Had similar experience. My best guess is that the account never went through the various age verification flows (since it was that old, it predated all that) and ended up being marked for deletion- I suspect that they had a bug (legal or in code) that prevented warning emails to get out. I got lucky to detect it early, since they disabled AI a few weeks before account deletion.
My gmail account still has the "First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail." mail in it from June 2004. The account itself is over 21 years old. I wonder if I'll get forced to age verify myself any time?