You misunderstood whatever you read... or whatever you read was wrong.

You cannot "cancel" a transaction. Once it is broadcast to the network, there is nothing you can do to remove it. It will either confirm (possibly after a LONG delay ie. days)... or the various nodes on the network will eventually drop it from their mempools and the transaction will disappear.

All you did was remove the transaction from your wallet... you didn't (and can't) remove it from the mempools of other nodes. Then when you attemped to respend, the network would likely have rejected your new transaction as a "double spend" as it still had your original pending transaction using the same inputs.