Yup. But the maddening part is that this is never made clear in any of the messaging.

You get a message like "all notes will be removed from this device", but without any kind of reassurance that "all 172 are still present in iCloud".

And if you're not an expert in this, it's a huge risk to take. When does deleting something synced locally leave it in the cloud, and when does deleting something synced locally also delete it from the cloud? This is one of the biggest and most dangerous UX confusions that exists right now, not specifially with Apple but all around.