I deleted a Timeshift snapshot and my root directory got wiped! WTF happened!?

I wanted to try Timeshift for backup. I made a snapshot, realized it was saved on the main drive instead of the second drive, tried to delete it, but the backup directory (/run/timeshift) was still taking up tons of disk space. I deleted that and shortly after my desktop started to fall apart and eventually I had to force reboot the PC. When it came back up, I was met with a grub prompt. I went into the live media and discovered that everything that didn't belong to the kernel had been deleted! WTF happened!? I delete /run/timeshift and my Debian 11 installation gets destroyed! It was only installed earlier tonight on a project PC so the only thing lost were a few hours of my time. But I'd still like to know why deleting /run/timeshift caused root to get wiped.