Those lists are not in anyway complete or representative and just include films famous enough thst people notice they're gone and discuss them. Say, noticeably missing films from famous actors or movies famous for being lost in studio fires.

It's not a myth at all that only a minority ofnthrnfilms produced on the silent wra have come down to us.

Early films were rapidly produced and wernt necessarily taken very seriously as a an art form. It's maybe easier to think of lot of early film as the equivalent of youtube or tik tok. Film is difficult and expensive to maintaining some forms are super flamable and unstable. Imagine a random tiktokthst cost monet to stop it from combusting or rotting.

There alao matter that of that minority that survived, an even smaller minority are viewable in any way, especially online. There are more films in archives or that survive as fragments, but most aren't around, and there are many that no one alive today knew existed at all.

Think of thr thousands of movies made that get submitted to film festivals today and don't get picked up for distribution. Or all the random terrible horror films that went straight to vhs or dumped on prine video now. If the last copy of them goes missing or gets burned or gets destroyed in a world war, a 100 years from now who would know that Zombie Strippers 4: Blood Tease ever existed?