Project File Disappeared After Save (.aep) — AE v25.3.0 Bug?

I just ran into a frustrating issue with After Effects (v25.3.0) that I’ve never seen before in 5+ years of using the software.

I was working on a project yesterday, saved it manually using “Save As”  — I do this manually every time when I start working on any project, just a habit, but even more hilarious that I even have a screenshot from my activity tracker that clearly shows me doing that. 

But when I reopened AE, the project still appeared under Recent Projects, and clicking it gave me the dreaded “file not found” error. I went into the folder I saved it in, and the .aep file is just gone — completely disappeared. No trace of it.

To make it worse, the Auto-Save folder is also empty, which makes no sense because auto-save was enabled. I’ve checked my system thoroughly (including hidden folders, Library > Application Support, media cache, etc.), and used Terminal to search for .aep and .aepautosave files modified that day — nothing.

This feels like a serious bug. I'm 100% sure the file should exist — I saw it being saved, and the filename was not renamed or moved. Nothing was manually deleted. Just vanished.

This is the first time something like this has ever happened to me, but it’s really shaken my confidence in AE's reliability.

Has anyone else experienced something similar recently with 25.3.0? Any idea what might have caused it, or how to recover the file?
MacOS Sequoia 15.5

Thanks in advance.

— Alex