That tissue was never maintained by one thing. It took three, working together:
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Your brain (sends the order to produce)
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Your adrenal glands (carry the blood supply)
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Your ovaries (build the wall and the acid shield)
When one corner goes down you feel it. When all three go down, there is nobody left running the loop.
Doctors have a name for what that does to the tissue. They call it GSM, Genitourinary Syndrome of Menopause. Up to 70% of women get it. 81% have never heard of it.
Here is what fails, corner by corner:
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Your brain stops asking for repair
Nothing gets built anywhere until your brain asks for it, and that signal has been fading for years, long before your periods ever changed. It is the same failure behind the hot flashes, the night sweats, the brain fog and the moods. Your hypothalamus lost its calibration. Nobody mentioned it was drying you out at the same time.
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Your adrenal glands stop feeding it
Blood is what carries moisture into that tissue from the inside, and nothing you put on the outside can do that job for it. That supply runs on androgens, and your adrenals have been sliding since your late twenties. More than half of it is gone by menopause, and it has never once shown up on a blood test.
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Your ovaries stop building the wall
Estrogen ran two jobs at once. It kept that wall thick, and it kept the acid shield up that holds everything else out. Both jobs stop the same year. The shield comes down, the wrong bacteria move in, and inflamed tissue cannot hold water. That is the sandpaper, and that is why lube sits on top and does nothing.
So it gets worse, not better. Left alone it goes from dry to daily pain, and the shield that holds infection out gets thinner every year. This one does not pass on its own.