Houseloads deleted?

The last time I played the Sims 4 was on January 5th, 2023 and didn't update my game with the latest update until yesterday, January 19th 2023. Upon opening my newly updated game, I noticed that my home page looked off. I didn't see my usual Sim who appeared near the "Resume" button but instead a white outline shaped like a sim. I thought this was strange until I clicked resume and saw that all of my sims completely disappeared, including the townies I haven/t played. I thought this was a weird glitch so I exited the game without saving and reopened it. The same thing happened. At this point, I was annoyed but not to the point of freaking out because strangely enough, the build I created on January 5 along with the rest of my previous builds were still in the game. So I knew that my game hadn't been entirely erased. But even after searching online for a fix to this problem, none of the suggestions ended up helping me. I still have my save files in my saves folder, but the game just doesn't seem to be reading them for some reason. Has this happened to anyone else and is there a fix to this? I clearly still have my save files, I just don't know how to get the game to read them.