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You could potentially do that, but if the clusters were previously maintained by rancher (for cert rotation, k8s upgrades, etc) those mechanisms will no longer be available on the imported version of the cluster. Did your restored machine have the exact same ip and setup as the one that died?

I don't recall all the details and don't know if it's documented, but as @polite-piano-74233 mentioned there are some functionality bits that clusters deployed via Rancher as downstream have which clusters joined separately do not. I remember asking about it when RKE2 supported SELinux if installed directly but not if deployed from Rancher and someone answered. From what I recall about authentication integration in Rancher, what ends up happening is that the Rancher local cluster holds all the info for the user objects and your downstream clusters are set up to point to it as external for the users. However I think all the RBAC Roles & RroleBindings & ClusterRoles & ClusterRoleBindings are set up on the downstream clusters. So I would guess there would be a way to re-attach your permissions, but it might be manually pointing those at what the downstream cluster might view as a totally new external user source.