Contacts deleted after unsyncing email account
I removed an email account from my phone and I lost all newer contacts that I had added within the past year. My contacts were all on ICloud, and that's still my default account, why did I lose all recent contacts? Or how can I get them back? They weren't linking back to the email account, so I'm not really sure why I would lose the phone contacts.
iPhone 12 Pro, iOS 14