From the article - bolding mine:Disembarking from the plane at San Francisco International Airport – and a little disoriented after a nine-hour flight from Tokyo – she left her denim jacket on her seat, at the back of the plane.

“I realized before I was even off the plane,” she says. “I was the third from last off the plane, so I asked the flight attendant if I could go and get it. He said no – I was required by federal law to get off the plane and stand beside it, where the strollers are brought to. I was tired, he said he’d bring it to me, I said OK.”

He did indeed bring it to her – and she boarded her next flight to Seattle. “A child was screaming next to me and I thought, ‘At least I have my AirPods,’” she remembers. She reached for her jacket – she’d left the two breast pockets buttoned up, one with her earphones, one with some Japanese Yen inside it.

Maybe she was so tired she forgot to put them back in her pocket after using them in flight? Maybe she put them in her pocket but didn't button it and when the FA folded the jacket over his arm they fell on the floor. Then the cleaners found them. Also she says the battery should be dead but they stayed powered on because someone paired them to their device, but if they were in LOST mode, you cannot do that. Lots of possibilities, her story is her version, but the facts look a little different.