How to store documents on my local drive AND synced in iCloud?

Hello, longtime Apple fanatic here.

I just bought a new MacBook Pro with 8 TB of local storage space. This is more than enough for ALL of my graphic design files with room to breathe. I do want files and folders placed in Desktop, Documents, and iCloud folders to sync to the could continually, but I don't want them to be removed from my Mac when they sync. The key here is that I don't need to "optimize" storage, but I do want everything to backup to the cloud continually, both for safe-keeping as well as access on other devices.

I have searched the web, and cannot find a definitive answer to the question: if I turn off Optimize Storage, will my files in those folders still sync to cloud as they are saved, while also staying put on my local drive? (I don't use iTunes very much, and I'm not much worried about email attachments eating up space.) I just want to keep all my design files at-the-ready so I can quickly jump between all my work, old and new, without having to hit the little cloud-download icon and re-download things that have been kicked up to the cloud when the the algorithm thinks I don't need to access it anymore. Sometimes I don't have a good internet connection or none at all, plus having to wait for large Photoshop files to re-download really slows down my workflow. I jump between old and new work a lot, so this gets really annoying. It's the whole reason I bought a machine with more storage space.

There has got to be a way to keep things backed up in the cloud as well as saved locally, otherwise what is the point of having 8TB of local storage space on a MBP?

Thanks for the help!