Many coronaviruses that are extremely closely related to SARS-CoV-2 have been found in bats - both before the COVID outbreak, and after.

Coronaviruses in bats don’t tend to exist as clear, unambiguous, stable populations. There’s extensive recombination and rapid evolution, and the many small semi-distinct populations of bats means that there are many small, transient populations of coronaviruses in these populations.

On top of that, it’s probable that SARS-CoV-2 isn’t strictly a bat virus - coronaviruses recombine rapidly and readily, and recombination with a non-bat coronavirus is likely for both SARS and SARS-CoV-2 (pangolins, in the case of SARS-CoV-2). So there’s no reason to believe that SARS-CoV-2 exactly ever circulated in bats.

So the notion that it should be easy, or even possible, to identify exactly the same virus in bats over many years is obviously mistaken. Nevertheless, many very close relatives of SARS-CoV-2 have been found in Asian bats, including several that seem to be very capable of replicating in humans and that share the receptor specificity of SARS-CoV-2.

> We found that the receptor-binding domains of these viruses differ from that of SARS-CoV-2 by only one or two residues at the interface with ACE2, bind more efficiently to the hACE2 protein than that of the SARS-CoV-2 strain isolated in Wuhan from early human cases, and mediate hACE2-dependent entry and replication in human cells, which is inhibited by antibodies that neutralize SARS-CoV-2. … Our findings therefore indicate that bat-borne SARS-CoV-2-like viruses that are potentially infectious for humans circulate in Rhinolophus spp. in the Indochinese peninsula.

-Bat coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2 and infectious for human cells

It’s important to remember that there are vast numbers of bats, and that they have been very superficially sampled. In spite of this, it’s been very easy to find these close hits, showing that these very dangerous, human-preadapted viruses are very common in bats.

Virologists have been warning about this for decades, specifically calling out that the next pandemic was likely to arise from bat coronaviruses. It shouldn’t be surprising that the prediction actually came true.