iCloud storage claiming it's full, have removed almost 50%, can't force a sync

200gb iCloud storage. I started getting notifications on my phone that my storage was full and that I needed to upgrade. Thinking it was a random upsell I ignored it.

The other day while working on a document that automatically saves to iCloud I received the same message. So I investigated. Storage full, looks like some of my vacation images and videos finally finished uploading and it hit 200gb. So I went in and deleted about 80gb of content.

The next day it was still telling me my storage was full. So I investigated again... looks like everything I deleted wound up in a .trash folder on my icloud drive, so the space used didn't change. I deleted the .trash folder and now I'm showing 120gb on the locally mounted iCloud drive. Online still says I have over 200gb used.

I tried moving an additional 40gb out to see if that would kick in a sync and online would update. Almost a week later and it still says it's full, despite online showing the same folders as I have locally. As in, the ones I deleted are deleted from online as well. I have tried numerous times to contact support but every time it says "something has gone wrong, please try again later". So I'm assuming Apple Support doesn't have any employees.

Any idea how to force a sync or otherwise fix this? It's an extra $7 to upgrade which wouldn't bother me except that I think their system has locked itself until I do, which makes me reluctant to support poor engineering in the name of making an extra dollar. I'd rather move it to another cloud storage that actually lets me synchronize content.