Documents folder not accessible locally on Mac Ventura after turning off iCloud Documents sync

I made the mistake of turning on Documents sync for iCloud. I wanted to keep my documents local but synced to iCloud. This reasonable expectation seems to be impossible.

But now when I turned the syncing of Documents off, it restored my Documents folder to my local Mac and I copy/pasted all my Documents from the iCloud Drive to that Documents folder but now I can't access it!

Checking its Info, the 10 GB of documents are in that folder and I have read/write access. But clicking on it gets me nothing, as if nothing is there.

I tried to restore it from a local Time Machine backup (all files were in there and accessible) but it still doesn't make the current Documents folder accessible. And the alternative of restoring a copy is no solution since the system doesn't let me throw away and replace the documents folder!

If I go to save a document that was open during this whole fiasco, it can see all the folders and documents in the Documents folder. Just Finder can't seem to manage it!

How can I get everything back to normal? Please don't tell me I have to do a complete reinstall...