There is a reasonable chance that it's a bug happening locally. It would still be really bad, but that would rule out gov. intervention theories, iCloud keeping

There is a reasonable chance that it's a bug happening locally. It would still be really bad, but that would rule out gov. intervention theories, iCloud keeping everything even when the user deletes it, and would also rule out wide spread sharing of these photos. If it's limited to local resurrection of the deleted photos, I'd see it as way smaller than what we had with CA.