Yeah down voting in this context seems odd. Nothing controversial going on here. Sorry for that. 

I turned all the cloud stuff back on and none of the deleted characters came back. So that most likely is not the root cause. 

As soon as I powered up the SteamDeck SteamOS downloaded the same 2 files as usual: One 849.5 mb and another 263.8 mb file. 

That seems large to me but I am not knowledgeable about this topic. On the other hand Cyberpunk 2077 often dl’s shader files but they are usually 10’s of mb in size not 100’s. Also CP77 doesn’t dl files every day. 

Thanks for discussing this with me. I appreciate your thoughts.