How can I reduce the amount of document storage used by notes app with zero notes

I may have a remedy. On a lark I simply deleted the app without turning off the icloud sync feature first. Normally that seems like a bad idea, because ... data. Since my notes are actually stashed on my laptop locally, they aren't deleted. Then I re-installed the notes app for the umpteenth time. Now I only see it using 1.5 MB of data. Still excessive, but way better than the flaming train crashing into a dumpster of 3.79 GB. (Aside: I remember when apple fans used to talk down on windows solutions involving restarting and reinstalling software) So sad....

tl;dr: I'm still open to suggestions on a remedy...

Turns out my suspected remedy didn't help. Given time, the documents and storage used by the notes app climbed up into the 17 Gb range anyhow. Intuition tells me it is something very broken on how synchronization works between iCloud and Notes and unfortunately I don't have the level of access required to sort that out.

Would be interesting to see what kind of traffic goes back and forth. I say this because it also looks like the notes app never finishes synchronizing even though there is (almost) nothing to sync. I qualify with almost, because I did drag a single, seemingly innocuous note back onto iCloud from my laptop, and that may or may not have resulted in the burgeoning storage consumption on the phone. IDK