I think you have to put things in the right perspective. The bar for a software engineering internship (for a student) is not that high. The expectations are not that high. When I was in college, I knew several fellow students who were bored with their projects, felt like they didn't get along with their team, and didn't really do anything useful, who got return offers (which implies positive feedback).
Did you deliver any code features / bug fixes during the internship, even if you hated it and/or the code got thrown away? There is a good chance that is considered enough for an internship. I'm pretty sure one of my internship project's code got thrown out at a company, but I still got a return offer.
For some reason I doubt the recruiter would lie about something like this. Perhaps the recruiter couldn't name names because the feedback was years-old and/or anonymized?
I see. Well this is just a standard feature of human interaction. I am always polite and cheerful in tone when I write emails. Even if I'm actually annoyed or bored or tired. It costs me absolutely nothing to use certain words instead of other words, to add an exclamation mark in certain places, etc.
Did you deliver any code features / bug fixes during the internship, even if you hated it and/or the code got thrown away? There is a good chance that is considered enough for an internship. I'm pretty sure one of my internship project's code got thrown out at a company, but I still got a return offer.
For some reason I doubt the recruiter would lie about something like this. Perhaps the recruiter couldn't name names because the feedback was years-old and/or anonymized?