It’s not like I wasn’t aware that it’s wise to manually verify that your backups are good before restoring them, but I was hasty and learned a hard lesson when I discovered that the automated database backups for my hosting account stopped working properly a little over 2 years ago. :'(
The good news is I was able to recreate the lost posts and the automated backups appear to be working properly now (though I’ll be examining them closely the next few days to be sure).
I’ve disabled some of the site plugins after two unauthorized WordPress admin accounts were created by unknown means some time between May 13 and May 14. I also restored a backup from a prior date to revert any potentially harmful changes.
Unfortunately, the backup somehow only included posts as recent as December 2023, but I was able to manually recreate the posts thanks to The Internet Archive Wayback Machine. I have a support ticket in with my web hosting provider to try to figure out why the database backups stopped working properly in March 2024. I may post more about that whole debacle another time. But for now, I sleep! ZzZ