How to successfully uninstall without losing image access?

Hi. We chose to not use WebP Express for various reasons. When I uninstall the plugin, most of the images result in a 404.

I took these steps to remove WebP Express:
– We did the normal interactive deactivate/delete uninstall through the WP backend.
– I looked at all .htaccess files to make sure there was no lingering WebP Express directives.
– I chown’ed and chmod’ed all the image files to the correct owner/group, and 644 permissions.
– I also deleted a directory under wp-content/uploads (I think) based on steps I found somewhere on the internet, but I forgot to save the URL and no longer remember the directory name.

Nothing changed the outcome…most of the images trigger the 404 page.

In another ticket I discovered you could add “?original” to the URL and it would retrieve the original image. This works, which I see as evidence that there is still something installed that is mucking up the works.

Help!