Can you safely delete and reinstall argocd without losing applications setup in app of apps pattern?

[mzalgaonker]

I am running argocd 2.11.3 (old I know). I initially installed it via:
kubectl apply -n argocd -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/argoproj/argo-cd/stable/manifests/install.yaml

I wanted to get argocd to manage itself so that I could easily update it, so I created an argocd app for argocd:

# kustomization.yaml
apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Kustomization

resources:
  - route.yaml

helmCharts:
  - name: argo-cd
    repo: https://argoproj.github.io/argo-helm
    version: 7.3.2
    releaseName: "argocd"
    namespace: argocd
    valuesFile: values.yaml

I hit sync in the UI, sync failed and I could no longer access the argocd UI.
If I port forward the pod directly, I can access the UI, so something about the services got messed up I think
kubectl port-forward --address 0.0.0.0 pod/argocd-server-6bbd7b4c88-6ld2s -n argocd 8085:8080

Using portforwarding with the UI, I have an issue where the server cannot talk to the repo-server pod, so it can't see the sync state of any of my apps.

I don't really know how to recover from this, so my question is can I safely uninstall and reinstall argocd without it deleting all the apps that were deployed with argocd?

Can the new installation pickup the existing app of apps and continue to work?

Is it safer to try installing another instance of argocd into another namespace and see if that can pickup existing apps?

My main concern is that if I delete argocd, will it delete all of the apps it deployed?