Photos Lost on Old iPad after disabling iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive

Hi, recently I found my old iPad from a couple years ago. The version is a 5th generation. After charging it and restarting it to fix its glitches, I went to go check the photos and saw 400+ photos on it that weren’t on my current iPad. I was happy to find these, but wanted it to not sync my other photos that I had already onto the old device.

Mistakenly, I turned off iCloud Drive, kept Optimize iPad Storage, and also turned off the iCloud Photos. After doing this, I saw that it started to delete most of them and left only the ones that I already had synced on iCloud. This made me confused and frustrated. I already looked through iCloud, and those photos that disappeared weren’t there. I already checked my “Recently Deleted” and other steps to see if I could recover them, but all I found was nothing.

Is it possible to recover them somehow? Were the photos not synced before I did what I did? I would like to know since if I can’t do anything about this, then it’s a shame I didn’t properly educate myself before losing some old data I wanted to have.