All of my documents created with .pages are gone

An operating system update does not wipe your local documents from your home folder hierarchy even though we do recommend a last Time Machine backup before an update or upgrade. I have never lost any document as a result of any update/upgrade event.

My Time Machine backup runs every hour of the day while my Mac is powered, whether sleeping or not. Same story for my portable MacBook Pro. I also periodically click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar to verify when the last backup occurred. Time Machine also depends on Spotlight indexing, so if for some reason you disabled that Spotlight capability on your local drive, that would have impacted Time Machine too. Also, look in the System Settings for Time Machine options to see what you have excluded from backups.

If for some reason, your Time Machine drive became corrupted or too full for the pending backup, you should have received a notification of that issue. Just what whacked your documents wasn't the operating system, but may have been something you installed (e.g. so-called Mac Cleaner applications) that may have run wilder than you planned.

If you were running a functional Time Machine backup on the local drive, then your missing documents would be on that backup drive. If your documents were stored on Apple's iCloud, there is a means to restore them in a given 30-day timeframe. Recover deleted files on iCloud.com - Apple Support

If your Mac has been Spotlight indexing the local drive on the Documents category, then you may be able to locate your missing documents if they are in some obscure folder location.

kind:pages created:>07/01/2025

If all of the above do not find or recover your missing Pages documents, they are gone.

Did you save your Pages documents to Microsoft's OneDrive or other non-Apple cloud service. That would explain the absence on your Time Machine or iCloud. In a couple of decades and a great many versions of Pages and macOS — I have never lost a Pages document from a local drive or iCloud.

Use the tools that are right for your workflow. If you are an experienced Word user, then that would be self explanatory and present a great many features not designed into Pages.