I keep Play Protect disabled so that it doesn't do shit like this. I don't need some mega corporation deleting stuff off my property that it doesn't agree with.
Mines good and from the Reddit thread the majority of people installed it on fdroid and maybe play protect just removed it because the package name and signatures didn't match, at least that is what's being suspected
Completely agree with you
A couple of days ago I was also confused I updated an app on fdroid and suddenly i got a push up message asking me to send the app to play protect to get it verified...
I have play protect disabled. It gets annoying that it randomly asks to re-enable every so often, so I created a Tasker automation to dismiss that popup of it detects it. Doesn't always work, but it's better than nothing. Super annoying that you can't tell Google to stop asking already and no, I don't want play protect.
I'm testing out grapheneos on another phone, which has all the Google stuff stripped out or sandboxed, so I don't have to worry about it there.
So no, play protect hasn't removed my KDE connect app, but it hasn't been given the opportunity to try.