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looks like dism restore health did the trick. Thanks guys

I don't really see the point of putting a whole screenshot when there's nothing more to see since the context menu is empty. But here it is:
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the pin and unpin icon is still there when I...

oh, I meant the context menu when I right click the items under recent, so as you can see that grey box on the right is me right-clicking the item. It used to show options like "pin", "remove from...

So this happened to me quite recently, the context menu of recent items from pinned taskbar items is blank now. I did not install anything new recently too, I have tried disabling context menu that...