Ouch. I hate to say it after giving you hope, but after harder testing, this technique actually doesn’t work. First of all, I got the name mixed up: “creation-date” should be “created-at”. But more importantly, I tested this with a text editor, and I must have tested by changing the date to the current time. However the text editor reset the file’s creation date, so by coincidence my test case appeared to work. I’m sorry.
But because of this testing, I can more confidently say that the program actually is showing you the creation date (at least on Mac OS). It’s likely that during your backup/restore process, the creation date got messed up. There may be a way to correct it based on a reference file (another copy), but I can’t do it with a perl script.
Also, any time I edit my files with a text editor, the creation date gets reset. Your editor may be different. (Logseq itself preserves the creation date when editing, of course. A modification with perl also preserves it, at least on Mac OS and Linux.)