The USSR's Venera photos were something emotionally powerful for me as a kid. I'm not even able to explain it now, but we only have images from three probes of the planet surface.
That's it.
The place is so absolutely extreme, so dangerous, that it devoured the probes in the span of minutes to hours.
We talk about Mars being Earth-like, but it's not. It's abysmally not. Venus is Earth-like, but utterly hostile to all life, and anything we could throw at it.

https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-surface-ever