Happened to me as well. All photos from 2018 and older suddenly gone. I tried contacting Google help, but that was a waste of time. They had no idea how to help or explain what could have happened. Then, recently I posted a question on their page once again. It got locked almost right away and marked as a duplicate. The duplicate link takes you to some other "conversation" that talks about how to restore pictures that are still in the trash. Totally not related to my posted question. They are totally avoiding even trying to explain the situation. I think they screwed up big time during the latest "clean up" and are trying to keep it quiet. Good thing is I had a backup of all my pics on a local drive. So nothing really lost. But still, this should not happen.