I was under the impression that Bip 32, 39, 44 (hierarchical deterministic wallet implementations) have a specific chain based upon hashes of derivation paths to seed phrases and that the wallet just starts from the first entry in the array and assumes after about 5 blank addresses, that there are no more UTXO's to be found in the array.
I remember a warning being given out not skip too many addresses while generating new payment addresses if you wanted the wallet to find those UTXO's and update the total balance.
I mean sure that's how those specific implementations operate, but the larger point was that all these options exist that most people don't even know about. And then those background technicalities create threat vectors that one would never be able to fathom without the initial knowledge.