They are indeed somewhere, but impossible to recover without cooperation from a large number of people who will be opposed to it. This happened to one of the co-creators of ethereum when his company Parity had a bug that caused them to lose millions of dollars of funding (which I think may now be worth billions) locked in a contract, much like what happened here. He tried to rally people behind a network fork to undo the change, but it didn't work. I believe this experience has a lot to do with his own blockchain project (Polkadot) having an explicit governance process that is and to change things like this without a network fork.

But this ship has sailed for ethereum!