I really can’t follow all of this. But I think you are saying you deleted the Vault manually from Finder? And moved a bunch of stuff around manually in Finder?
Obsidian keeps a list of vaults. You can delete the vault from your filesystem. Or you can remove it from the list in Obsidian. Removing it from the list in Obsidian doesn’t delete anything. And deleting it from Finder wouldn’t remove it from that list.
So depending on what you meant, there is no magic there.
And if you were manually deleting portions of a vault and moving things around, maybe you missed some hidden settings folders?
The error specifically says it can’t find /Volumes/GoogleDrive/My Drive/SYNC/OBSIDIAN_VAULTS/.obsidian/plugins
If you manually made a vault, make sure that .obsidian settings exists, of course. But make sure you have also have a “plugins” folder. I don’t think that folder gets created until you install plugins. So if you just copied Markdown files over, and not settings, then Obsidian will have auto-generated .obsidian for you, but maybe not /plugins.
Sorry, this was a long and convoluted message. What I meant by “magically” was that when I installed the new version of Obsidian in the laptop, it opened in one of the subfolders of the new vault, even though I had not assigned it any vault.
The new vault that I had created in my desktop computer contained subfolders with the same names of those contained in the old vault but the name of the vault itself was different, so the path had actually changed. So the Obsidian installation in my laptop recognized one of the subfolders as a vault (although it had a different path now) yet it didn’t manage to recognize the parent folder (defined now as the Obsidian vault in my desktop computer). I don’t know if this makes more sense.
Anyway, the problem seems to be solved now. I restarted my laptop computer and then it loaded all the plugins, recognized the new vault and everthing works.