Big Sur: Documents & Desktop folders totally empty after turning off "Desktop & Documents Folders"

In the latest Big Sur 11.2.2: My documents and desktop folders went totally empty after turning off "Documents & Desktop" syncing in iCloud Drive settings. Steps I did: 1. I went to **System Preferences** > **Internet Accounts** > **iCloud** > **iCloud Drive**. 2. I enabled the checkbox for **iCloud Drive**. 3. In options, I enabled the checkbox for **Desktop & Documents Folders**. 4. It seemed that a syncing process started. However I realized this was going to take forever, and my iCloud Drive is full. 5. After about 60 seconds of it being on, I disabled the checkbox for **Desktop & Documents Folders**. 6. A popup appeared asking "are you sure you want to do this" and I pressed return. 7. The dialog disappeared and now my Documents folder was called "Documents — Local" and it was empty. Also, everything on my Desktop instantly vanished. 8. To clear out of this state, I disabled iCloud Drive entirely in **Internet Accounts** > **iCloud**. 9. My "Documents - Local" folder went back to being called "Documents". However, all the files are still gone, along with everything on the desktop. 10. I found a folder, "iCloud Archive" in my root folder. It has a Documents folder of its own, which contains all the *folders* that were in my original Documents folder. However, the *contents* of all the folders are missing. I.e. none of my files are there. I used three different file search utilities including good ol' UNIX find . -name MyFileName to look for files that I know should be there, and they are. Just. Gone. Period. Gone. cd ~/Documents; ls -latr gives nada. NADA. Same for Desktop. As a last-ditch effort, I tried deleting my user's Finder prefs, Desktop prefs, and any prefs that sounded remotely related to iCloud or syncing, etc. Restarted multiple times. Ran Disk Utility. No dice. No files. How can the system literally delete all the user's files as a consequence of them canceling a sync operation? How can all my documents be gone without me ever having issued an explicit deletion command — and with no way to undo the operation? Surely there is a way to recover from this... right, guys? Right?