That's the thing. It wasn't me. Someone in the scene received it from original artist, and he put it on minidisc, this was end 90s. Those who appreciate the genre, love these hidden gems, but it is only available as lossy due to minidisc (and MP3). Back then, FLAC did not yet exist, but CD did. Regarding MP3, codecs (including LAME) improved a lot over the years. The overal quality of the LAME presets, nowadays (and this has been tge way for more tgan a decade), is good enough compared to lossless, something double blind tests confirm.

In this case, I believe you are right: I don't think the data would've survived without minidisc. But in other circumstances where the user did not know minidisc is lossy?

In the end, a lot of these hidden gems have been (re)released because lost tapes (and, I suppose, HDDs) were found which is neat.