This is an Autodesk Maya requirement. The first time a user opens Maya on a workstation, it creates all the <homeDir>\Documents\maya\projects, maya\scripts, etc... directories.
This is the default location for the MAYA_APP_DIR directories that Maya needs to run successfully.
My guess is that when the machines were previously built, they were built from an image that someone had run Maya on at least once to set these directories up, and when the new image was built, this never got done.
You should check what user account your machines are using for the proxy_account, then login to a machine that you used to create the new image, run Maya, pull another image, and deploy it.