The alternative is that there are backups … but Blizzard can’t/won’t spend the time sorting through them.
It’s quicker, cheaper and less hassle for them to say “nope, not doing it”. They’re by now fairly adept at ignoring customers protests … sometimes for years. They don’t care.
The consequence of this is that more people are coming to understand that Blizzard of today is NOT the Blizzard of the past. As long as they’re getting a reasonable profit from WoW, they don’t care.
As far as we’re concerned … we can either choose to stay or go. If we stay, then we need to accept that nothing is sacred, that nothing in game is safe and, almost worse than that, Blizzard are no longer the type of company who will try and fix any losses. Essentially … we’re on our own, and spend our time playing “at our own risk”.
They refuse to even give an individual the TLPD that they killed but then were unable to loot, because they can’t be bothered going into the records and confirming that person killed that rare and qualified for the mount. They’re not going to spend the time refunding thousands of items missing from guilds vaults from thousands of players.
Bugs are an expected part of this type of game. The number and severity of bugs this time around are exceptional. The reaction/inaction by Blizzard is an indication of something pretty serious going on in the background which is rather worrying.