Sorry to hear about that. This does sound like a sad scenario of the old game mechanics in play… However there are times where a bug will take your items or character… Just play with that in mind… and that blizzard won’t recover any lost items… even if it’s an issue one their end.
Sorry for your loss, but yeah… careful when recovering bodies and such.
This I do think they should change tbh.
Though don’t hope for any kind of item recovery… this is what they told me when my items were just gone…