There was so much inconvenience but he eventually got them all back after complying with all the demands. So I guess you could also recover your accounts.
What a ridiculous amount of work just because he didn't take the 30 seconds to either write down the shared secret or back up his 2FA accounts. If you use a good 2FA authenticator app such as Aegis, it takes literally three clicks to export an encrypted back up which you can then store on a USB drive and can be used to restore all your 2FA codes should your phone be damaged, lost, or stolen.
I think we can say an exchange will steal/hold your coins if you were locked out and appealed their decision and when access was returned you did not find your coins then we can say your coins were stolen or confiscated
Yeah, that's not how exchanges work. When you log in to your exchange account and see a balance, all you are seeing is an entry from their internal database of user balances. You are not actually seeing your coins as reflected on the blockchain. Usually within minutes of you depositing any coins to an exchange, they have already been swept in to a central wallet.