Why does Lightroom Classic complain when no My Pictures folder exists during Import?

After cleanup up empty directories from my system, I found a curious behavior in Adobe Lightroom Classic 10.1. When opening the Import dialog, the following dialog shows up despite having never imported, exported or saved anything in the deleted folder and the Import dialog showing a different valid folder of images. In other words, Lightroom Classic opens the Import dialog, shows the content of the folder about to be imported but complains that a folder which was never used is not available! In all cases, Import is set to Add in-place and never to move or copy images.