iCloud Pictures Randomly Deleted From All Devices

My spouse's pictures from pre-2021 on all of her iCloud devices are just gone. iCloud account, phone, iPad, all of them have just disappeared. And most of the help we continue reading about are “if you didn’t mean to accidentally delete them…” etc etc. They’re not in a hidden folder or recently deleted. They’re just gone. Who would delete thousands of photos and memories from years prior? This is absolutely an iCloud issue and an Apple issue. And she’s not the only one we had read about where someone’s pictures and videos have just disappeared. We pay for extra iCloud storage. It’s not full yet, and they shouldn’t just be deleted anyways.

so what’s the deal?