To be fair I can't blame them for this--the feature is confusing (I'm pretty sure it's responsible for every photo in my account up to a point in time last year being duplicated [in a rather annoying way--they appear visually identical and have the same EXIF tags and timestamps, but are different sizes, as a result my obsessive compulsive tendency won't let me delete either]).

I presume you can still download all your photos via Google Takeout right?

I do blame them.

Google Photos should have been a frontend for Drive from the beginning. Splitting it into another storage is wrong.

Google wants the ability to promise unlimited storage without any of the responsibility of meeting that promise.