This might be a good moment to explain the Retain policy applied to the PersistentVolumes we created.

ReclaimPolicy defines what should be done with a volume after it’s released from its claim.

The policy was applied the moment we deleted the PersistentVolumeClaim that was bound to manual-ebs-02. When we created the PersistentVolumes, we did not specify ReclaimPolicy, so the volumes were assigned the default policy which is Retain.