Mac mini: iCloud Drive files download with optimized storage

I have been using iCloud Drive for a long time. I have everything on my Mac mini synchronized with iCloud Drive. I have it set to optimize Mac storage. All of my documents should be on my machine but recently, every time I go to open one, it has to download it from iCloud first. There is more than enough room for them. However, I thought that because I have such a large Photos file, which is also synchronized, that it is taking up a lot of space. However, that is actually only taking up about 17 GB on my machine. I have 79 GB available on my machine. I included a screenshot to show that I have the proper settings. I hope someone in the community has some idea what's going on and how to fix it.