Help all my old files are gone

Look for recovery files. 

I found the problem and it had nothing to do with AA 2021

Apparently for some reason all my files are written in gibberish.

For example, "89J970JFRH74J9F9f12hN67nn970N"

I have no idea why that is happening and if someone could tell me what that means, i would appreciate it.

But essentially, I uknowlingly deleted those files because I thought it was junk. 

To echo Kglad, this is unusual and def not an Animate-caused issue. It's very likely you were saving your files to a cloud-based drive that is now offline or you no longer have permissions to read. When you go to "recent files" in your OS and within Animate, are any of these suspect files listed?

i've never seen that and i've never seen anyone else report that, so it's not likely an adobe issue.

animate can corrupt all open flas (especially if it crashes while they are open), but it's hard to imagine it doing anything to files that are not open.

check your trash, check your av/antimalware etc sequestration folders.  google things that might have gone wrong on your computer.