icloud photos missing/gone

Today I needed to restore my iphone 5 from an icloud backup. It was the first time that I've had to do this in more than two years.

The restore went as expected except that my photos were completely missing. I went on icloud.com and found that there were no pictures on there either. I'm not sure how this is possible as my settings showed that photos were meant to be synced to the cloud. When I did the restore two years ago, all of those photos were transferred. To my knowledge, my icloud settings have never been changed.

Admittedly, I should be more diligent about logging into icloud and checking on everything. I should also be more diligent about syncing my devices with computers, but because I've been using apple products for so long, I have reached the absolute max on authorized devices. At this point I am wondering if there is any way to get those photos back.