I was quite baffled by what happened yesterday. On Worldbuilding Stack Exchange there was a line of questions, revolving around alchemists and spoons. Given that it was quite fun, these became quite popular. However, one question has been deleted, probably because some people thought they'd have to exert control over the content. Well, I gave an answer which yielded me quite a lot of points... until the question was deleted, which caused me to lose all of them.

The question is this:

What is the reasoning behind punishing answerers for deleted questions? What if an additional aspect is that the question had 40 upvotes which indicates a publicly accepted good question, and was deleted by a moderator?

The points were granted, the questioneer may have gotten the answers he/she was looking for - everybody involved put in effort, and everybody was rewarded who earned it. And all of that can be undone arbitrarily at any time, as it seems (but let's ignore that).

Imagine you work 12 months, earned your paychecks, and then the business is shut down for whatever bureaucratic reason. Now the state is taking your 12 months of wage along with destroying the business - to "undo" your work.

How is this justified? Is the reasoning as simple and technical as "the system just counts existing answers and questions"?