How to remove iCloud Drive from Macintosh HD?

Did you turn on Apple menu > System Preferences > Apple iD > iCloud (in the Preferences sidebar) > Optimize Mac Storage?

Even if you do that, there will still be a local copy of your documents on your Mac if the Mac is not low on storage.

If you want to turn off the Desktop & Documents option of iCloud Drive, or if you want to completely turn off iCloud Drive on your Mac, see the instructions in Add your Desktop and Documents files to iCloud Drive - Apple Support

Your answer was not really helpful. The point is, he has almost 300 GB of storage being eaten up by iCloud stuff. I have a similar problem. We do not want that stuff on our local hard drive. We only want it in iCloud. We want to free up that space for other things. So ... the question remains: how do we delete those unnecessary files from our local hard drive, yet keep the files in iCloud. I have "Optimize Mac Storage" turned off. I do not want any files downloaded even if I do have space.

Sorry, the answer may not be helpful but iCloud is designed primarily as a syncing service. Apple did not design iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos for cloud-only storage.

If that is what you need, you may want to evaluate 3rd party options such as Google, DropBox, OneDrive.

Nope. iCloud is primarily designed to keep all of your devices in sync. If you optimize storage, older/bigger files will offload to the cloud only first, moving down to newer/smaller files. Space is freed up as the system needs it. You can elect to "remove download" on files as a measure to place more documents into iCloud only, but those may download again automatically at some point in the future.

Similarly, if you back up your Mac, items in iCloud only are not backed up to Time Machine or other backup as they are not resident on your system.

Thanks. I deleted my iCloud files from my SSD, excluded a bunch of files/folders from my TM backup, and I am not optimizing storage since it appears that the real result is to fill up the SSD with iCloud files until "the system needs to free up space" which is when the SSD is full. But don't think I'm utilizing iCloud at all now between my MacBook and my other iDevices since I have iCloud Drive turned off under my Apple ID. If I turn it back on, will the same thing happen to me one time? I'm very confused about this whole experience.

If you deleted files from your iCloud Drive folder and enable iCloud Drive again, those files will be deleted across all devices and in iCloud. But yes, provided you have room for your files, iCloud will keep them on your Mac. That way the files are accessible to you and are backed up to your Time Machine backup. When you run low on space, iCloud will begin to offload files (starting with oldest/largest to newest/smallest) to free up device space.

Really, I thought that was exactly what iCloud was. An in the cloud storage device. It's taking all my SSD space to the point where I can't do a OS update.