Google Workspace Templates

[fiza]

Today we noticed that one of our custom templates that we have in the Google Sheets Templates Gallery disappeared. I got onto support and unfortunately the guy I spoke with had broken english but the gist of it was that a user deleted the original Google Sheet that the template was based on and this led to the template being removed. This was a user who left in July.

I am not sure if that is 100% accurate so wanted to ask the resident Workspace experts @rogerdnixon @paulkerton and anyone else who is familiar with Google Workspace and templates. How could a template suddenly disappear? Surely it shouldnt be linked to the original document a user created? I thought once it became a template that it was independent of any user and their actions on the original.