I’ve gotten the impression that if I down-vote a folksonomy tag that someone else has added, it could disappear (if it only had one vote previously). For obvious reasons I haven’t tested this much.
It seems like the tags are gone completely and not just voted down. I’m guessing that this would happen if 1) the tags only had a single “(up)vote” for them and 2) the editor who added the tag removed the tag (or deleted themselves/got deleted, in which case I believe all tags, ratings, etc. associated with said editor also gets removed).
Ratings and tags are tied to user/editor accounts since it’s inevitably subjective (and thus personal) data. If the subject/person doesn’t want to be associated with MB anymore, any subjective data of theirs should also be removed (see e.g., the GDPR etc.).
You can look in old database dumps. I don’t remember exactly where they are (and I’m just about to board a plane, so can’t look myself), but try looking around our FTP server?