It was done in a sort of site cleanup. Here is a quote from Tom himself about it.
"We did a cleanup of everything that was deleted more than six months ago and never achieved more than 500 views. This was done to both free up storage space (almost 300k items plus their feed variants and thumbnails) and to avoid creating unpublished projects for deleted entries, besides ones that had more than 500 views or were deleted in the past six months."
AmmoGuppy
It was done in a sort of site cleanup. Here is a quote from Tom himself about it.
"We did a cleanup of everything that was deleted more than six months ago and never achieved more than 500 views. This was done to both free up storage space (almost 300k items plus their feed variants and thumbnails) and to avoid creating unpublished projects for deleted entries, besides ones that had more than 500 views or were deleted in the past six months."