The populateLogUsertext.php script needs to be run on Wikimedia wikis so that old log entries appear when specifying the performer. The disappearance is due to T188826.
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Either run this, or switch to using log_actor and the newly created actor table. T188826 has already been fixed.
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See also: T29711: Run populateLogUsertext.php on Wikimedia wikis
I think that for consistency sake (of the data), it's probably better to run scripts like these, but it might be that due to very old data on en.wp it might not be as easy. I still think stuff like this qualifies as Technical-Debt though.
(I remember the Analytics team was doing a whole set of normalisations/cleanups (this being one of them), that in theory probably should be applied to the master data of esp. en.wikipedia. If this is run, maybe we should check for impact on their normalisations).