This has been happening for years. Microsoft forces users to create an account at setup then conveniently makes sure you never remember that password again by having you setup a pin. Saw a decent number of customers have to setup their PCs again because bitlocker triggered and they didn’t know the user or password the recovery code was associated with.

I’m not even surprised. I predicted that something like this will happen years ago. Most users don’t even know about bitlocker (not even talking about recovery-keys). Therefore nobody is storing them. If now the TPM gets cleared somehow, be it a firmware or windows update or something else, you’ll lose any access to your data.

I’m not surprised that it happened at all, I’m rather surprised how long it took to happen.