re: “Are they sure there aren’t any NEW craters on the moon? The craft could be embedded in the moon’s surface.”
Seeings as the “retros” braked the speed of the lander (this is a lander, remember) as it approached the surface; how much of a ‘crater’ do you think it left?
When they lost contact, the lander had a 50m/s lateral velocity. It probably slowed a little more after that, because the lander was solely under the control of an onboard computer that was running a pre-programmed landing cycle, but it probably didn’t slow by all that much. My WAG is that they miscalculated the terrain in the vicinity of their landing site, and the thing plowed into a hillside that was taller than they thought, and was probably buried under regolith.