You ever lost access to a sim card that was on your WhatsApp account? Did you manage to register a new number and retrieve your backup from
Google drive?
It's confusing and there's no access to the app now to use the change number option which should have happened months ago.
I'm hoping that it works at this point I mean there must be a scenario where for example your phone gets stolen and for some reason you get a new sim card instead of getting your old one from your provider (which I can't do outside my home country). And you basically buy a new phone and a new sim and you pray to the Gods that when you log in into your Google account you get your backup.