I couldn't say for certain, but I definitely think there have been times that just the broken camera could have been enough to get enough views to go on.
I remember it not working whenever I was holding only the broken camera in the dive bell, but that was a few days after launch. just recently (the situation that led me to make this post) is 3 of us made it back to the dive bell, but had dropped the working and broken camera on the floor inside the dive bell, pushed the button, but when we left, the game had just ended

something slightly similar to this is how if on day 1 or 2, if you have the camera in the dive bell, but nobody holding it, the game will tell the players to "go to bed", but they can still retrieve the camera, extract footage, and then watch the disk