I’ll add my two cromcoins in here:
Because I care, I track the issues that might not apply to me as a predominantly PC player, on behalf of PS players. Therefore I’ve been following Crom’s gradual Single Player Experience degradation. Other players whom I admire and will not bring into the discussion have wiped and started afresh. I sincerely appreciate and honor that behavior, yet I am resolutely in the camp of protecting players’ savegames if possible.
We have taken every effort to make backups and ensure Crom has familiarity with the process, and the reversal of any errors is reassured in him that he can restore from a recently-acquired Cloud backup benefit from PS Plus.
The next parts are due to my testing in PC where I can see the DBs, the Backups and the Recovery “shunts” that are built in the case of a nonexpected game closure. Obviously we can’t access the raw game files on the PS, or one of us would’ve cracked it open.
My assertion is that at some point, and this is a 
Columbo-like process in many respects, that while playing, his console was unceremoniously switched off due to a power issue. If this happened whilst playing, in certain modes and configurations, f’rinstance … you might cast a block under the terrain that violates an Event. Under normal circumstances, after you close the game and restart it, the miscast block would either be pruned, or you’d be forced to go back to a system-made backup of the .DB.
BUT because the miscast block was placed and you were shut down by a power outage, I believe PS’s autofix system (on reboot) may well have altered your game’s DB. As I’ve said elsewhere, any exogenous alteration of the DB can have long-term and cascade effects on your DB. My assertion is further that a Table or Attribute was prepended or appended.
So back to the now-permanent miscast block (or other involuntary “violation”): Because (in my humble appraisal) the Event System was an all or nothing venture, no Events were spawning for you. NOW, you are getting some, and this is after the all or nothing coding has apparently been squarshed.
What we are now seeing is a gradual depopulation of the world, one camp at a time. As your resident game whisperer, I think they’re connected.