There would seem to be disincentives to prioritising fixing problems like this that affect unimportant people.
It strikes me as valuable to the crypto world that the mainstream media criticism of cryptofinance is that it is environmentally unfriendly. That is almost a distraction from the fact that it is antisocial and nihilistic.
it sounds to me like the fix would be create a new map that maps account ID -> tokens, where account ID = the "sender" account where the tokens came from, and do the migration to move these 'orphaned' tokens into the right buckets.
admittedly I guess that would break everything/trust if someone can just rewrite the code to say who has what tokens!
A defining feature of "smart contracts" is that the code is immutable once deployed, and can never be upgraded or bug-fixed.
But yeah you're definitely right about the nature of the contracts being immutable, unless that immutable code contains some setter that delegates the function calls to some other contract.
ERC-721 (NFTs) actually has a nice way of dealing with sending NFTs to an incorrect address by checking if it implements a special interface if the recipient is a smart contract. But any measures come at the cost of extra gas so they are usually avoided.
It's been quite a long time since I have been playing with smart contracts and I don't actually remember what happens when a smart contract is created.
Additionally, apparently contracts may rely upon one another, and a bunch of the contacts that utilize this WETH token depend upon the existing contract. All of these (and their dependents, recursively) would also need to be updated.
I.e. the money is gone unless there is a large concerted effort, but no one should reasonably expect this.
Thst said, the network is a group of machines all agreeing together on what is the correct behaviour, and that can change, so while it is not impossible forever — Ethereum might release a new feature that allows people to reclaim tokens in this circumstance — it is impossible unless the majority of the network agrees (see: The DAO hack and the corresponding fork to recover funds).