Ventura install disappeared after being very slow

I was running Ventura on a Mac Mini 2012 A1347 and today it mysteriously disappeared from the OpenCore boot picker.

Everything on Ventura was very smooth the first two days I had it, but today I turned it on and it was extremely slow: the menu bar and dock took a while to load, opening the control center or WiFi menu caused the menu bar to hang and show a beachball, the OpenCore app just jumped for a while and took forever to open, and even popups like restarting took a while to show.

I set it to restart and left to go do something, when I came back, it was in a weird open core text boot picker and when I restarted again there was no Ventura option in OpenCore.

It is strange that OpenCore still boots from my drive, but it doesn’t see Ventura. I think the install must have gotten corrupted somehow.

There was nothing important on that install, and so I will likely just reinstall Ventura.

My question for you is: have you seen anything like this before, and is there any way you know of to prevent something like this in the future.