dnf upgrade to Fedora 35 using --downloaddir just wiped out my entire home dir... !

So... went to do an upgrade to Fedora 35 and found that I was lacking room for the downloads.   I have /home set up on a separate drive, so I did the following:

dnf system-upgrade download --downloaddir=/home --releasever=35

The upgrade went well, except when I rebooted into F35 I couldn't log into my home directory.  So I rebooted and logged into a console session.  When I did, I got an error message stating that /home/<me> was missing.   ls /home showed me that all my home directories are missing.

I'm guessing that dnf downloaded all the packages for the upgrade to /home and then did a rm -rf * on them, taking out my home directories in the process.  Can someone confirm this ?

Any chance I can recover the files ?

I am beyond angry that this happened.  I've been using Fedora forever.  I'm sure I've used --downloaddir before without this happening.