To be fair, say if you played in Legion, then came back in Battle for azeroth, your artifact went poof. And the heart of azeroth is extremely likely to go poof once the next xpac comes out. Your gear is crud when you come back, inflation has made your gold reserves worth much less, your no longer max level (if you quit for a long enough period). Those are the progression systems of WoW, and they do degrade when you leave for long periods.
You do keep your inventory in boundless (each of your characters). So that’s what 28 inventory slots each? plus all the coin doesn’t go away (although it’s value could still decline but that even happens if you bury cash in your back yard). I understand the frustration, of course there are those of us in the community who have offered lots of solutions for “planed” time off from the game. Fif's Storage Unit's are open for business - #2 by Fiffer13 is my own example of this (not a rental, and if I run out I’ll build more, and if you want I could drop a location of these with a gleam club beacon wherever you wanted, so you could store everything of value there).
Otherwise, I do like the idea of prestigious builds turning into “ruins of [insert beacon name]”. Make this area regen at a rate of like 50x slower until it falls below X prestige, in which it simply goes the rest of the way wild and normal regen rules apply. I would say X prestige is something like 25% of the beacon’s original prestige, but it could also be a fixed amount like 150k or something. I do think the much slower regen would be helpful for people to find and recover hard work, but also makes it possible to find only partially regened places which are always my favorite when I go loot… I mean recovering, yeah that word sounds nicer…