At least you were able to restore them. 25 years ago I was using the service and went a while without logging in. They deleted some of my favorite photos. They were photos I had taken with a cheap $20 digital camera (pushing it to it's limits). I hadn't backed my photo's up anywhere else so they were just lost.
Edit: I see now that there were actually no photos to restore. A second question I wondered is if I could get at those long lost photos (I'm sure they were physically deleted back in the day).
This is 100% true.
I also lost all my old Yahoo accounts because I didn't log into them for >1 year. Same for a lot of videos I made on a nice little site called GoAnimate. So keeping data is better than removing it! Even charging a fee feels fair-ish.
But forcing me to sign up for a subscription on an account I don't actually even have any data? Weeeelll, this doesn't feel so nice :)
I use a Yahoo address for "throwaway" stuff like online shops. They had a catastrophe and lost some people's mail. I never got such an email, but one time I looked, and it lost all of my emails before 2000. Yeah I'm that old, when Yahoo launched an email service in 1996, I thought, "An @yahoo.com address?! That's so cool! I have to get one!".
In theory a copy of the emails are on a harddisk, but its control board melted, and when I got the same model disk (to transplant its control board onto the disk with data), I couldn't find the original disk...