Bulk editing/removing inline images?

I have a strange situation and I’m wondering if anyone has any tips…

I’m helping out with a blog that has been around for about 6 years, has about 4500 posts, and — until recently — had about 22,000 images in the media library. Unfortunately, another developer managed to wipe the entire site last week, and their backups were abysmal. I had a recent copy of the database and theme files on my local computer, but their uploads folder was 17GB, so I never copied that over from the server.

As a result, their image content is basically gone now. That sucks in general, but it also sucks because it leaves a ton of broken images in their posts.

I removed all of the old entries from the media library, so if anything was set as a featured image, that can fall back gracefully rather than just showing a broken image. But for anything that was inline, we’re still left with a broken image.

Is there a way for me to go through and remove inline images in posts that are no longer in the media library? I’m kind of surprised WordPress isn’t smarter about that. If images were inserted into posts as shortcodes rather than just inline <img> tags, it would be much easier to make sitewide adjustments to your inline images and to fall back gracefully in situations like this.