Optimize photos quality when sending via text or 3rd party apps

I did see that disclaimer and feel like you're right, but at the same time iPhone is supposed to be user friendly. It's not clear what "Full-resolution versions can be downloaded from iCloud anytime" means. If I want to post a picture on Twitter, or print one at CVS or Shutterfly, how do I get the full res version of that one photo? It cannot be "Download and keep originals" because I did that once at the Apple store and it took 4 days to download. Millions of iPhone users around the world must have both optimize photos turned on and use social media/print/text photos/vids. So this must be an enormous global issue and I'm perplexed why it takes longer than 30 seconds to get an answer lol...

So just as an FYI, step 3 above (Select Download and Keep Originals) will download all of your media locally, not just a select few. This can take a week or more to complete, and then you're back at having no space on your iPhone. This is what I do not want. I don't want to wait a week and download 150 GB of data to post a picture on facebook. My goal is to optimize my photos (to save space locally), AND still have the option to text/post/print media at full resolution. Downloading one at a time seems not to work, and if it did, it would just be a duplicate that would have to be deleted after sending/posting/printing (otherwise there's just a bunch of duplicates).

Sorry, I truly do appreciate your help, but I think we're going in circles. I just want to know how to access my full res media. Can anyone else help? I made an appointment with Apple to see if this is just an enormous oversight or what, but would love some help in the meantime if anyone knows!

Eg: If I take a pic right now, it sends the full res to icloud and stores a 'thumbnail' locally. Now I want to text/post/print that pic. If I use the pic on my phone, it is very grainy and low quality (because it is not full res). So how do I text/post/print that photo? Millions of people must struggle with this so I have no idea why it's not easily searchable lol

This looks like how to download media not stored on your device. I followed every step (tapped download twice and it had the spinny thing that shows it's downloading), but nothing happened after that. It is not in my photos. Does it just save over the original photo Because that one is still there. Also I feel like this definitely cannot be the real answer that is specifically targeted to "optimize my storage" users. I have to go to a site and download every time I want to send a nice pic to someone or post on social or print? Somethings wrong...

Anyone else know the answer to this?

Sorry I hit solve by mistake and apparently I have to write a post to undo it