How to recover missing iMessages?

I turned off iMessage on my phone because I didn't want my text messages popping up on 10 different devices throughout my houses. I went and turned off I messages on all the devices. I thought I'd solved the problem, but I just found out 3 months later that I've actually been missing a large percentage of text messages sent to me over this time period. Instead of rerouting the texts to my number, they just disappeared into a void, with no devices consuming them. I have turned iMessage back on, but there seems to be no way to recover lost messages. I'm in tech and I find it very hard to believe that apple would design a messaging system that would simply discard messages if there were no consumers listening to them. How can I access these old messages that were never sent to any device?

I am aware that I can deregister from icloud, or join the class action lawsuit against apple over this issue. But how can I get back the messages that apple lost? There should be something you can log into to see a full history of imessages.