Setting items in iCloud not to sync with iPhone

I have been an apple user for a long time and have a decade worth of videos and photos that are stored in my iCloud. I've bought lots of additional iCloud usage. However even in optimised form the data exceed my iPhones capacity.

Surely it makes sense for Apple to provide a feature to allow a portion of the stuff in iCloud to be segregated or selected not to be synced, or only be retrieved on request. (I.e. store thumbnails or something on the phone)

I don't see why I have to delete photos and videos to be able to use my phone. I don't want to store the stuff on my PC as that is how I have lost most of my older photos.

Is there a way to do this? I.e. store stuff on iCloud which is either not replicated to my devices or only available on demand? So that my Iphone storage is not full?