Wow, it’s been a while!
While neglecting to publish some new posts due to being busy with work, I also overlooked the fact that after the GCP trial period ends, there is only a 30-day grace period for you to update to non-free status before they TERMINATE your compute VM. This means that while your deployment history and GCP project will still be kept, everything else – including the things you installed/changed on your VM – will be wiped.