WRT to blocked and deleted users and silenced and deleted posts the notification API does a few stupid things that often end up resulting in notifications being served to the user that can't actually be displayed, hence the conflicting counts and ghost notifications. The proper fix for this would to just have the API not try to serve you notifications containing projects and/or posts that you do not have access to.
This looks incredibly similar to what happened when we blocked ourselves (https://help.antisoftware.club/support/discussions/topics/62000184938). We couldn't see any of our recent notifications except... follows? Clicking load more did show us past notifications, we believe.
Using blep's notification popover (https://cohost.org/blep/post/51879-waht-if-notification) was our workaround <3
UPDATE: Turns out this is because a post of mine that I silenced suddenly blew up! I unsilenced it, and not only did my notifications start working fine again, but also were stuffed full of notes relating to that post!
Chaia
I keep getting the notification icon, but whenever I click the notification button, not only are there no new notifications, it doesn't show me any of my notifications until I click Load More, even though I have notifications from today.
Interestingly, this only happens on my main page, not the others?