Hi! While it sucks this happened to you, this is also not often the case with the auto disband feature.
Since survival has a limited amount of space, keeping everything that everyone has ever claimed, doesn't work out.
People often quit without disbanding their claims, so removing this feature altogether will restrict active players, since they'll have fewer chunks to claim or fewer areas to build in because they're already occupied.
The time period used to be 60 days, but it was shortened to 30 days recently so that it was consistent with other auto delete/disband features I believe.
It's highly unlikely it'll be changed back again, since it was only recently changed & like I said, it remains consistent with other features.
I've taken breaks from survival before, but when I did, I logged on for a couple mins just to reset the timer. If your laptop isn't working, this should still be possible on a mobile version of minecraft such as minechat, chatcraft, pickaxechat, etc.
Hope this helped.