Does indexer:reindex build everything from scratch?

Been playing around with indexer:reindex and I noticed that it produces different results if I first truncate the target table.

For example, a select catalog_category_product_index for products under category with id 18 was returning 380 products even after reindexing. But when I truncated the table and ran reindex again the same query returned 756.

Does it make any sense?

Turns out to be a known issue with reindexer on this table. https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/8018