As someone says in the comments, standard quick formatting a drive (especially on a spinning rust hard drive) doesnโt delete any data. It just says โthis drive is now emptyโ but doesnโt do more than that.
Iโve recovered files for friends from formatted drives, without a single file being lost. Itโs not even hard. Formatting a drive does nothing substantive. Itโs like if you wrote on the outside of a full file cabinet โthis cabinet is empty.โ