No storage on iphone 8 with 64GB and paying for icloud storage, with only 2 apps and not many pictures

Help! I've had this phone (iphone 8) since June of this year. It has 64 GB, plus I pay for $2.99 a month for icloud storage. A few months ago, I had gotten to about 13,000 photos and my phone started saying that there was no space. I started transferring over my photos to my external storage and I began deleting them until I got to about 2 or 3,000 pictures. Since it began saying I had no storage, it sill says I have no storage even though I've deleted so many photos and almost all of my apps. I only have whatsapp and instagram on my phone right now. And nothing I mean NOTHING works on my phone and it is so frusterating. Apps crash all the time and it turns off when I try to open an app, and just recently it will turn off when I try to make a phone call. I'm so frustered and I don't know what else to do.

What I really don't understand is how it let me get to 13,000 pictures and it never showed my storage to be full and now I can't even open my camera without it crashing.