Photo app stuck on "Restoring from iCloud" with no progress bar

I want to migrate all my photos from my photo app on my Macbook 2014 (Catalina) to iCloud, then delete the entire library from Photos on the computer. So, I purchased and set up iCloud, but after 3 days iCloud had only imported 3,000/18,000 photos and 200/800 videos. I called Apple support to see if there was anything I could do to make the process faster. They made me copy my entire photo library to an external hard drive, then delete them from the internal hard drive. After setting the external hard drive library as the system photo library, it said "Restoring from iCloud..." Apple support told me to call back if it didn't start uploading in 1 hour. Nothing changed, so I called again, and they told me to wait another 48 hours. It has now been 48 hours and the bottom of my library still says "Restoring from iCloud..." there is no progress bar and nothing beyond what uploaded before changing the system library has uploaded to iCloud. Do I keep waiting? Any other steps I can take?