How to avoid having to restore iphone stuck on apple boot screen?

My phone is constantly near or on full storage. Sometimes it glitches and wont allow me to clear files and the remedy Ive found is to restart it.

This time when I tried to restart, my phone got permanently frozen on the apple screen. The only option I've seen so far is to try to force the recovery screen and try to update through iTunes, failure meaning you would have to restore.

Updating my phone through iTunes fails due to there not being enough storage. -_-

Restoring wouldnt be a huge deal, except my last backup I can find was at minimum 4 months ago due to dwindling cloud storage, and no hard backups closer than 8 months ago.

I would lose a considerable amount of data valuable to me.

So, I am wondering if there is a way for me to either:

1) Access and edit my iphones internal storage to delete enough apps to free the storage for the update

2) Access internal storage to do a hard back up and then restore. (sounds stupid)

3) Upgrade my cloud storage and run a back up to that through my laptop. (seems the most unlikely)

These sound slightly dumb, I dont know enough to know.

My thoughts are just that while my phone cant turn on right now, that is supposedly just due to needing an update that I dont have space for, and all of my data is still sitting separately in internal storage.

So I would hate to lose everything just because of the gigabytes needed for an update to turn on.

I guess I just don't know how linked the booting issue is/how compromised or inaccessible my data is.

Help/thoughts appreciated.

Thank you