Messages taking up 5.20GB of my storage.

Recently I've been trying to cut down my storage from my phone to try and keep it alive for as long as I can. And so I've gone from 40GB of storage to about 28-29GB of storage. But something is keeping my storage up: My messages. I've searched up tutorial after tutorial online of how to clear my message storage. At first it was 4.8GB being taken up so I deleted some stuff, and it went down to 4.2GB. But recently it's shot up to 5.2GB being taken up... I've deleted every conversation I've had, every attachment sent to me, and I've made sure to check my storage every day and it's not going down at all. There hasn't been any new iOS updates either, which I heard could help clear some apps' storages out. And the strange thing is I only text about 3 people. Any ideas of how I could decrease my messages storage?

Extra info: I have an iPhone XR and I am on iOS 17.5.1.