Contacts disappeared after re-authenticating with Outlook/Exchange

I sync all my contacts to my old Hotmail aka Live aka Outlook.com account. Today I needed to look someone up through [Outlook.com / People](https://outlook.live.com/people/) web-interface (normally I just do it on my phone) and I realised her contact is not there, while it is on my iPhone. I went to phone settings -> Contacts -> Accounts -> Outlook and it said this account needs re-authenticating. I went through authentication, which went through successfully. What I expected to happen == The contacts on my iPhone that are not on Outlook.com are uploaded to Outlook.com What actually happened == The contacts that were on my iPhone but were not on Outlook.com were never uploaded to Outlook.com. Instead they got deleted from my iPhone without any warning. What I checked == - The deleted folder on [Outlook.com / People](https://outlook.live.com/people/) is empty - In my iOS Contacts app, in Groups (arrow back on top left in main view) it shows "All Outlook" list/group only, there's no "Deleted" list or "On my iPhone" list. That "All Outlook" list used to say I had 119 contacts, now it says 110. Is there any way I could get my contacts back? My latest phone iCloud backup is from yesterday. I can erase my phone now and restore from the yesterday backup, but my concern is: this is a serious step and it has to be something of last resort. I am also concerned something else can go wrong, and I'll lose more than 9 contacts. My trust in things working as expected is not the highest now - for example, this whole situation shouldn't have happened in the first place, the phone should have asked if I want to merge contacts before deleting them AND/OR have some kind of recycle bin folder from which I can restore. I think it used to be like that, but not anymore. Is there anything that I'm missing? This answer here https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254833042?sortBy=rank makes it seem you can toggle contacts sync and they may come back, but it's iCloud-specific, and my iCloud contacts are turned off. This is iOS 17.5.1