How to trace/fix false $term->count, rogue term relationships?

Question

On a page listing terms from my ‘source’ taxonomy, I loop through foreach term…

foreach ($all_source_terms as $source_term) {

    // some stuff

    echo $source_term->count;

}

When I echo $source_term->count;, it outputs a count of posts for that term.

In one term’s case, the output value is 2.

But, on my taxonomy-source.php page (where I do a WP_Query for ‘post_type‘ ‘any‘ in order to show that term’s posts etc), this value appears as 0 and no content is displayed. Here is the query, FYI…

$queried_object = get_queried_object();
$object_prefixed = $queried_object->taxonomy.'_'. $queried_object->term_id;

$posts_per_page = 300;
$paged = ( get_query_var( 'paged' ) ) ? get_query_var( 'paged' ) : 1;
$args = array(
// pagination
 'nopaging' => false,
 'posts_per_page' => $posts_per_page,
 'paged' => $paged,
 // order
 'orderby' => 'date',
 // 'order'   => 'DESC',
 // posts
 'post_type' => 'any',
 'status' => 'publish',
 // 'offset' => $offset,
// taxonomies
 'tax_query' => array(
   array(
     'taxonomy' => 'source',
     'field'    => 'slug',
     'terms'    => $queried_object->slug,
   ),
),
);
// the query
$posts_source = new WP_Query($args);

Now, the above rogue term in question is ID 1169. When I go in to phpMyAdmin and search tables for 1169, I see 2 results in wp_term_relationships, for object_ids 129898 and 129900.

However, when I put those IDs in to the WordPress post-edit page (post.php?post=129898&action=edit), WordPress says: “You attempted to edit an item that doesn’t exist. Perhaps it was deleted?”

Indeed, when I search for either of those object_ids in phpMyAdmin, NONE are found.

What’s going on here?

I wondered whether the posts existed but I had undone the custom-post-type registration. But, hey, the posts are not found in phpMyAdmin.

So probably the posts HAVE been deleted, but no-one told term-relationships?

This is likely to be the case for several terms.

What code can I use to properly fix term relationship counts – ie. remove relationships for posts that don’t exist?

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