Practice — Personas, Journey Maps, and Jobs-to-be-Done (5 questions)

A PM shows you a set of "personas" the team built during a workshop two years ago, where stakeholders guessed at what users needed based on gut feel. The deck describes them as "based on user research," and the roadmap for the next two quarters is being prioritized partly around what these personas supposedly want.

1. Are these proto-personas or research-based personas, and what specifically distinguishes the two?
2. What's the concrete risk of continuing to make roadmap decisions based on this artifact as-is?
3. With a small budget (say, enough for 6-8 short interviews), what would you do in your first two weeks to validate or replace them?
4. How would you raise this with the PM and stakeholders without alienating the people who built the personas in good faith?