Probably depends heavily on how you rate things. Vocabulary, pronunciation, orthography, sentence structure, etc.

Also, is this just counting the major languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian), or minor languages like ladin, romansh, catalan, corsican, etc.

also huge news for transylvania

Transylvania, with an alternative Latin prepositional prefix, means "on the other side of the woods"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transylvania#Etymology

I don't know about that but having hired and trained a few folks in Romania, they have a weird aptitude for other languages.

I wouldn't say so. I think Italian is closer to Latin in general. (Source: I speak Romanian and Italian)

Romanian has some influence in the language from neighboring Slavic countries, and a few German and French words.

The one thing that is closer to original Latin are noun cases like copil (child) -> copii (children) -> copiii (the children) -> copiilor (of the children/the children's...). I'm not super familiar with Latin, but an Italian friend that studied it said this is one of the most complicated things (and there are 7 cases in Latin compared to 3 in Romanian).

This is what I remember from my latin class too.

Also interesting because dacia was one of the last provinces conquered by rome and one of the first to be abandoned so they had the shortest timeline of Roman rule but kept the language the most.