In retrospection it probably wasn't as scary as I thought at the time (a few hours ago) but it's still chilling having to think in parallel where my backups are (yes, I do have them for important stuff!) and what to try to dig myself up from the mess. The partition table in question was a nested (DOS/fdisk extended) table with two partitions - a scratch partition (luckily located in front of the outer partition) and an important work partition with the ext2 file system (which can be mounted in FreeBSD, Linux and Windows).
One of the things I couldn't get working is e2fsck to find any backup superblocks, so I searched for a utility that can brute-force scan them. I found TestDisk. I've never heard about it before, it has a user interface worse than sysinstall, but it worked. After some fiddling with it, I had my working file system back.
Except for a naming bug in gpart, it looks like my data is back to normal now.
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