iPhone Storage is going crazy

I don’t know what’s wrong with my phone but ever since i hit a storage limit, it hasn’t gone down no matter what i delete or how many times i restart the phone. It’s been like this for a week; i’ve deleted almost every app on my phone and only have about 4 apps that I use daily. My photos disappeared from my camera roll (i had 10k and now i only have 4k). It says “restore from icloud storage paused” at the bottom even though i’ve made room for them to as I have been deleting photos. Another problem with that is that when i delete photos it won’t let me empty out my deleted photos so how will i possibly make more space? I just wanna know what the huge gray “other” thing in my space is. how do I get my storage back? I cant download any of my apps again and they constantly crash even with only 5k in my camera roll and twitter, spotify and instagram. Should i just replace my phone?