The mental model that fixes most of this: local and remote are two unrelated databases that happen to share a schema. Not two copies, not two environments of one thing. Two databases.
Once you hold that, the confusion largely stops, because you stop expecting them to resemble each other and you start asking which one you mean before every command.
What follows from it:
Local is disposable. It lives in a directory under your project and you should be willing to delete it at any moment. If deleting your local database is scary, you have put something in it that only exists there, and that is the actual problem.
Remote is the only thing that matters. Everything in it is real. Nothing about it should ever depend on something you did by hand.
They will diverge and that is fine. Local has test junk; production has real rows. Trying to keep them in sync is a losing game and not a goal.
The practical consequence for your delete incident: make local reproducible so you never have to protect it. A schema plus a seed script that runs in one command. Then wiping local is a thirty second inconvenience rather than a loss, and the only database you have to be careful with is the one you should be careful with anyway.