Lost sequence - Why is this even a feature??

I am an extreme newbie - I spent about an hour working on a project to where I was done making edits and wanted to focus on color grading the videos.

So like any newbie would, I clicked on the "X" next to my sequence to, what I thought would just close the timeline panel, but no. It deleted my entire sequence. 

Now I thought "How weird! they wouldn't just put a button so detrimental to the creative process right out in the open. My project must be saved somewhere" Alas, After searching through the community answers and and doing my own digging, the sequence is nowhere to be found. 

All the answers on here suggest "Just look in your project panel and find the sequence icon" Okay it's not in there all that is in there is the raw footage I used to create the video.

"okay but it should be in your auto-saved folder" sure, but when I drag it in it all comes out as one solid video, meaning I can't make any edits to the clips. 

This is a horrible feature and I can't image why it's so difficult to recover a project. Please do soemthing to fix this I am not the only one experienceing issues.