Why the **** did Vortex uninstall all of my mods when I deleted the COPIES of the ARCHIVES in its stupid staging folder to free up diskspace?

[Shrapnel]

Why the f*#@ did Vortex uninstall all of my mods when I deleted the COPIES of the ARCHIVES in its stupid staging folder to free up diskspace?
What is the reason, that Vortex needs all of the f*#@ing mods TWO times? Installed and uninstalled? Why? Why the f*#@? It was 50 gb of mods just
sitting there, eating up space and with them gone (and I did that with older versions of Vortex just fine) the f*#@ing Launcher decides to just UNINSTALL every mod,
but since I deleted the COPIES in the staging folder I SOMEHOW CAN'T REINSTALL ALL OF THEM?
Why? What's the reason for that? Why is that necessary? Someone explain to me, why deleting 50 gb of redundancy utterly destroyed and f*#@ed up my playthrough of
720 hours?

[showler]

The staging folder or the downloads folder?

Because the staging folder is not "copies of the archives", it's the actual installed mods.  It's the only place they exist.  The "files" installed in the game directory are just virtual links to the actual files in the staging folder.

Now, if you meant the downloads folder then that's different.  Deleting them shouldn't affect your mods.