MacBook storage and Adobe creative cloud!!! urgent!!*

I just recently got an internship with a marketing company where I will be using a lot of applications from the Adobe creative cloud. I have a MacBook 13 inch 2019 with the 1.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 processor and 8 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 memory. I've also updated to MacOS Monterey. I have no idea what any of this means lol.

Everytime I go to use Photoshop, Premiere Pro, or Lightroom it pretty much crashes immediately. I just bought a 1TB memory external hard drive, I literally put every folder, document, picture, etc. that was on my laptop into this external hard drive and then deleted it off my laptop, always making sure to clear out my trash can. I've freed up everything that I possibly can - my storage menu says that there is only 43 GB left of storage, while about 25 GB is being used for applications (all ones that I need), 16 GB for MacOS, and 36GB for system data (I dont really know what that is).

I've seen many videos that say that there needs to be at least 200GB free for these Adobe applications to run smoothly. There's just no way that I can get this much freed up, right?

I guess I'm just wondering if this is a matter of having not gotten a MacBook with enough storage for these applications in the first place. Or is this a matter of me just not understanding how exactly to free this space up correctly? Can my external hard drive that I purchased help me at all? I am kind of slow when it comes to computers so please bare with me. I just need to know ASAP if I should be investing in a new computer as I know I must look like an idiot as I told the company I work for that I can use these applications and now I have to turn down their projects because they keep crashing.