My iCloud photos are disappearing

Hello. Ever since I started using iCloud to store my files and photos I've still had problems with storage. These photos still take upwards of 30GB on my phone despite being stored on iCloud and I have never been able to make that go away.

Recently I went into settings and toogle "Sync iCloud Drive to this phone" off and then on again. I realized that this straight up deleted the recent files from my phone, but kept it all to iCloud. I was still able to see and access them. So I kept doing this whenever my iCloud Drive took up too much space on my phone.

I had the bright idea of doing this with my iCloud Photos. Toggle off and then on. It asked me to either "Remove photos from device" or download it all. I chose remove and waited a minute before toggling iCloud Photos back on again.

This was a huge mistake. I noticed immedietly that my albums and the photos in those albums are disappearing. The number of photos is going DOWN and I can no longer find these photos on my phone. Not even unsorted, outside of the albums I put them in on the camera roll and timeline.

When I access photos via web nothing has changed, but I am afraid these results will sync with my web as this has happened many times before, making these photos unrecoverable.

I see the settings and my phone claims it is "Syncing up" with the rest of my icloud and needs to do so connected to power overnight, just like when I first set it up, but it keeps stopping and freezing because of "Lack of storage." There is NOTHING taking up my storage other than iCloud photos. And I dont understand how syncing results in REMOVING images.

Doing this just made my photos take up MORE space.

As I speak iCloud Photos has already deleted 12,000 images from my phone and they are not in recently deleted. I am afraid it will eventually sync with my web host computer account and wipe photos from there as well. Never to be seen again

I need solutions NOW because I am not in the position to be able to schedule a talk with Apple Support. Due to the extreme uncertainties in my life's scheduling. It will all be gone by the time I can find a good time to schedule. Which may be weeks from now. These are really important photos and they all got up to too much GB (250+) for me to be able to back it up anywhere outside of iCloud. Sorted all in iCloud. I will lose so much more than just these photos, they were very important to my family and I might end up homeles if any one of these disappear.