As of recent update (52.2.1), all columns in the message list have disappeared for the inbox of one of my accounts. All other accounts and folders were fine. I could go over the list of messages and open and read them individually, but the items in list looked blank - white on white, except for marked messages - those lines were colored, but empty. The problem also propagated up to the combined inbox. Although only account was affected, that was enough to ruin the combined inbox as well. Restarting Thunderbird without add-ons did not help. I was ready to give up, but then realized that header (Subject | Correspondents, Date etc) was missing on the affected account. Clicking on the little "Select Columns..." icon in the upper-right corner of the list showed no columns selected. Doing "Reset columns to default" helped - it brought back the account to normal.

I definitely did not remove any columns myself. This worked fine for years, and only happened today. Even if someone does this by accident, this state with zero columns should not be allowed - there is no legitimate use for it. Thunderbird should warn or display default columns in this case - it is very difficult to figure out what's wrong.