Mystery Mac Scenario? No programs at all is working suddenly after restart:

After my last restart when I try to open any program (even system settings) I receive this message:

You can't open the application “app name” because it may be damaged or incomplete.

(just for illustration above, all of the programs yield the same seemingly)

If I look into the «applications» folder there are no symbols showing (Icons of various programs are seemingly gone) and the app launchpad window is empty not showing any app symbols…… :

Now how could that happen after a restart???? (All the apps are seemingly suddenly  …… gone?

Scenario just prior to the restart:

This mystery problem happened on MacBook Pro with a good old OS X (High Sierra) and on a profile on the Mac which was previously restored via Time Machine (after the hard drive crashed, I did for about a year ago install a new drive and restored the whole Mac from the Time Machine backup with 2 admin user profiles on it). Now some people (a person in Adobe for example) claims that the restored Mac from Time Machine is in general  not as good / reliable as one created from scratch. I am not sure if this can have anything to do with the problem?

I have had some problems with Adobe Creative Cloud and had kind of given up trying to fix it. But there was a window which opened telling me something like that I needed to repair Adobe Creative Cloud, which I btw ignored…. (Just seconds before the restart):

(just for illustration above, not sure if that was the exact Creative Cloud message)

I have made a video of this (on Youtube), which shows in realtime what the problem looks like from my side.