Is This a Lost Cause?

I apologize, there’s a bit of a long story to tell here.

Since around 2005 when I had an HP desktop that crashed and I came dangerously close to losing all my stuff on it, I’d maintain all my computer data on a flash drive because portable storage seemed like the safest thing at the time.

It was sufficient up until a few years ago when the last flash drive I was using suddenly corrupted and most of the files couldn’t be opened, copied, moved or even deleted and I was only able to recover a small fraction after my stepdad fiddled with it.

Well, being something of a romanticizer, I could never bring myself to throw the thing out. I tried once but ended up fishing it back out of the trash. I still long for some of the files I could not recover.

Over time, however, it’s gotten worse. My Acer now barely reads it, my Macbook doesn’t at all.
On the Acer, the drive is recognized but is shown as empty and requests to format which I never allow because it informed me that it would have to erase the entire drive to do so.

The other day I decided to once again attempt to fiddle with it and discovered file recovery software.
I tried one called Data Recovery Wizard which I’d seen used in a Youtube video and it confirmed for me that at least a fraction of the data is still there.
It found up to 140+ files after three or so scans. What I care most about recovering are my word documents/fanfics of which it found just three.
They, however, are mince meat, nothing but pages of blocks of symbols.
I also tried to open a PSD it found but Adobe Photoshop called it “not a valid photoshop file”.

I decided to try a different software to see if it would get me different results and chose one called Recuva. Well, it wouldn’t even read the drive at first and then said it couldn’t perform the scan because it’s: “Unable to determine file system type”.

I’m not sure what that means but is this confirmation of what I’ve always known in the back of my mind, that I’m trying to milk a dead—hell decomposed cow? Is this a lost cause?