Choosing to absolve the cat deleted my save... Kinda sucks.
Could I please ask you to provide more details? How did you play the game (Browser? Download?), on what software (which browser? Which operating system?), did you do anything else? Was there anything specific in your run?
I've tried replicating that bug twice now. I've defeated and absolved the cat in our development environment as well as on Chrome, and neither of those times was my save file impacted.
I also invite you to the Discord (https://discord.gg/jHmzbJJr) if you want to chat about this there!
I played in the browser on Edge on Windows 10. I had previously absolved the cat a couple times and was just hopping back into the game to see the new updates and decided to absolve the cat again and when it got to the end game screen which I couldn't exit out of, I just refreshed the browser page and when the game loaded back up it acted like I'd never played before with no save file available.