Thanks to your throw on bots, I also starting checking for those. Pretty much all of my requests come from names not quite suspicious as the ones you sent, so I suppose there’s more to it
I made a recording of all 424 requests somewhere around the day of the 28th of January, and repeated this today with my 391 requests leftover.
This means there’s ~30 people gone (think I got 3 new ones since then, of which 1 I did accept)
So… I started doing the boring work comparing each page with each other until I found some anomalies. Occasionally one person appears like 4-12 spots later, which is annoying for comparing, but ultimately doesn’t change the numbers.
Inactive/terminated users or accounts still show up, whether their name’s been deleted too

But then- someone missing on page 15, so I went to check:
It now reads ‘add friend’, as if they’d never sent me a request in the first place, which is strange considering they did in fact sent me a request:

Nothing strange for a bit again… until – you guessed it – the final few pages.
Coincidentally these final pages have lost a few contestants, whereas some others have stayed. Compare for yourself
Current final two pages:
And last 4 (!) pages on the 28th
I am not sure what determines whose request expires and if it’s linked to account activity or such, which wouldn’t make any sense considering one of the people whose request disappeared is online right now:

Other example
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Think it’s safe to say that they do in fact disappear. The numbers match up too (~30 people gone and the number is down ~30 too)
- It’s not just bot accounts disappearing
- It’s not just terminated accounts disappearing
- It’s not users blocking you and then unblocking to possibly cancel the request
- It’s not the user ignoring / declining requests
.
I did realise something…
Early March of 2022 this was changed:

It didn’t just wipe away 500 people, but simple displayed the number differently (500+ could still be 1241) **
So… what this means is the requests have (always?) been disappearing or expiring 
As my oldest request is from someone whose account is from 2020 - it would be strange if no one had ever sent a request before they did.
Then again, this still doesn’t answer when they ‘expire’ and why some more recent ones go away before another. The oldest request is seemingly outliving more recent ones
Was it merely a coincidence that this number dropped below the ‘500+’ for the first time after many years, very close to the 1,000 friend limit update.
Maybe it is unrelated, but what’s certain is that they disappear at rapid rate…
** edit
Unless this was the point at which it went under 1,000 , but then … that would’ve been 500 requests gone in ~3 years, whereas in the current past 7 days about 100 requests vanished which doesn’t add up. Unless back then I had 15,000 requests which
- doesn’t add up with 1k.+ going to 500+
- There’s no shot I had ever close to. Maybe 5k. at max
Seems like something clearly has changed though 