Thank you very much for your assistance in helping me wrap my head around this whole fork thing. I'm wondering though what would happen if I earned some of the coins pre-fork, since I requested the payout post-fork, would all my pre-fork coins be gone?
The coins you mind before the fork still exist. The payout after the fork never happened. So those coins should still be around. The pool might have recorded the payout to you but they'll just need to reverse those since any forked payouts made on pre-forked coins were never actually sent.
Forks are super annoying but thankfully pretty rare, even in alt chains. It has been ages since it happened in BTC I believe.