Mac won't recover deleted photos space...

Hello. I've recently upgraded from an old intel macbook to a m2 macbook air. Very happy, but I have a major major problem. For years I've transferred my devices images and videos to mac "Photos" app and because I was transferring 1000's of images it would take a very long time to do it, and then I've always exported all the images and videos to an external hdd with a lot more available space. But problem always was that for whatever reason importing the files would take a long time but deleting them was basically impossible and my intel mac would freeze and had to "force quit" Photos app. So I decided to just manually delete the Photos's file (folder?) in "Pictures" and that was the only way I could delete the files... I've been doing that for years.

Anyway to present time with my newer m2 macbook air. I transferred all my photos and videos like always (now a lot faster 👍) but out of "routine" I just closed the Photos app, and then proceed to just delete the ".photoslibrary" file (folder?) and then empty the trash, like I've been doing for years... But after a few days I realized that I was missing a lot GB so I went to "system settings->storage" and realized that, for whatever reason, the Photos app and System Data can't "count their" respective folder size (GB). It always stay with a loading circle (I literally let it load for hours and never changed). If the macbook "storage" calculations are correct I'm missing over 40GB that I think that was the total size from all the pictures and videos I originally transferred. The desperate thing is that this new macbook is only the 500GB model so I lost close to 10% of available space 😫. I'm certain this is a "glitch" of some sorts because I've been doing this for years on intel mac and never had this problem. I've already updated the mac multiple times and it's still missing all that space. The ".photoslibrary" is only a few MB so obviously the file system knows it's real size but never actually gives it back as available storage... I don't want to change my ways I just want my missing space back. I don't want to reformat the computer and then use time machine just to keep missing the space or reformat the computer and start from 0... took me days to install and configure everything... storage is very limited on this computers...

Running Sequoia 15.4