I suppose anything is possible but I haven't even had straight gas around since i went to the diesel mower 5 or so years ago. But guaranteed it has seen its share of ethanol.
Maybe he meant that it 'had some' ceramic in the cylinder? I've never seen one that bad. (I'm no mechanic, but I follow along on a lot of these threads to try to learn from guys who are) I don't think even straight gas could have done that much damage - something was bouncing around in there.
Probably an air leak causing it to run lean. That is some pretty significant damage to the piston I doubt old gas did that.
Just threw the "straight" gas out there as an aside, due to the severity of damage. I would leans towards a failure in the crank seals/bearings. As pointed out previously, and upgrade on the intake assembly is a good idea if you do rebuild this saw.
Air leak usually doesn't get that bad unless you just keep feathering the trigger to keep them running. Out of all the saws I've seen two had an air leak that had good bearings. One blew out the case gasket and the other had a leak on the sleeve on the clutch side. 90% of the time it's carb tuning that kills them.
This has always been a real smooth good running little saw. It doesn't really have that many hours on it and I was kind of surprised when she told me about it. I suppose the real question is what to do now.
I have to assume you did not do this to the saw. It's the kind of thing you would have noticed if it happened while you were running it. So I'd say, whoever did this, owes you or your ex wife a good running 2152.
