Sadly I am That Guy - it’s not true. Trees do indeed have the ability to turn branches into roots and grow new branches and trunks, but only if they still have a few roots in the ground to be allowing them a metabolism to fuel the process; if they were somehow completely flipped they’d straight up die. Also, this story is glossing over just how much work it would be to flip over a tree. Like “they took an excavator” is a phrase that’s covering so much work. You cannot do this “with an excavator”. This would take days of work with considerably more tools and people.
What it IS is just a messy looking tree whose branches made some non-tree people think they looked like roots, and then an urban myth spawned.
Which is a shame, because there are loads of examples of trees that have survived some absolutely insane levels of damage. My personal favourite is a UK yew tree that got struck by lightning, survived, the lightning split the trunk, rain got in and rotted out the heartwood, and so it turned one of its branches around and grew it down through the middle of its own trunk to root at the bottom, thus creating a brand new trunk.
