No reliable way to remove photos and videos from iCloud?

Please help! I am having an extremely frustrating time trying to get videos and photos out of iCloud. My specs are Windows 10, fiber internet, iPhone 13.

My iCloud storage space is maxed out and I want to remove files so that I can make space for more auto backup capability. I’ve tried multiple ways to do this but have found major issues with each of them:

• iCloud website: After the photo or video is downloaded, the correct date and time it was taken is almost never preserved. It is almost always a different date and/or time. However, on the iCloud website the date and time always is correct so the data is obviously there. I’ve tried looking at different column types such as Date created, Date modified, and Date taken and none of these ever consistently show the correct date and time.
• iCloud for Windows desktop application: The video files come in significantly larger. When downloading from iCloud web, a video file will be .MP4, but via the Windows application it will come in as .MOV. Thus, for example, a 324 MB MP4 file now via web is a 2.3 GB MOV file via Win-iCloud. Thus, you cannot download reasonably sized files via the Windows application. Also, there is a very large 2.8GB video file that now constantly stops mid download with a 0x80070184 error “The cloud sync provider failed to perform the operation due to network being unavailable.”. I try to reboot my computer and it will redownload for a few minutes partway through the file and then stop again with the same error. Lastly, the downloading process is even more slow than iCloud website, painfully slow, almost close to 1 MB / sec. This makes any quick removing of files off iCloud an extremely long process.
• USB: When trying to move files directly from my iPhone to my PC via USB, it will almost always transfer some files but then will always stop mid transfer with an error saying it lost connection with my phone. I can reboot my computer and reconnect my phone and go again but it will always eventually do the same thing and stop at some point with an error.

Can someone please help?! How do you do this reliably?

Thus, there seems to be no reliable way to get files out of iCloud and still retain the correct date the picture or video was taken. Plus, moving any files from iCloud is painfully slow. This all seems intentionally done in order to keep as much data on iCloud as possible for as long as possible. This in turn motivates people to buy more iCloud space, which means more revenue for Apple. The fact that these kinds of issues are relatively simple to fix means a massive company like Apple has no excuse for not fixing these or making it easier to offload files. For example, the correct date and time is shown on each file on iCloud which means iCloud contains this data but it never gets reliably transferred over to the files themselves. There is no technical reason for why this could not be fixed. iCloud seems to be the only reliable way to store videos and photos when compared to trying to do it via a hard drive. But even then, the website version doesn’t even provide any ways to sort files by video length, by file size etc which would help someone be able to more quickly remove large files. Again, this seems to be done intentionally. There is no other reasonable explanation I can think of other than Apple has intentionally done this for revenue sake. And this seems extremely asinine…

If someone can help me to see this differently I’m open to viewing the situation differently or see a reliable workaround to this. Maybe I’m missing something…