I have the exact same issue... except its with my Macbook's internal SSD... yeah.
Happened sometime roughly after I upgraded my mac to MacOS Catalina. One day, I decide to restart my mac, and then next thing you know it can't find it's boot drive. Question mark icon on a blinking folder when I try to boot up.
I would really like to just be able to mount my internal SSD again so I can access my data normally, but for now I am stuck booting off of an external drive with MacOS Catalina installed, using 3rd party data recovery software to try and save some of my data before I will probably inevitably have to format the SSD and start over again.
Any known fixes to mount my internal APFS drive? Its not even recognized as a boot drive when in recovery mode... Thinking this is more serious than I'm making it out to be!