What a surprise when i discovered that you don’t seem to need to backup Whatsapp messages any more. They apper to be stored on Meta servers. I’m sure it was not like this in the past? My wife left her GrapheneOS phone on the roof of the car and drove off. I managed to recover it but it had been ridden over by i car. So boight another pixel and installed Whatsapp again. She can’t live without it as all her clients are on there. When i setup Whatsapp on new phone, all messages appered again, just like that. Spooky … I think in the past it wasn’t like that?
As nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de said, maybe your wife had activated backups and you did not have any knowledge of it (and maybe she forgot about enabling it as well)?
But if what you say is true, that sounds horrifying. Meta should get in trouble for this.