Messages on iPhone not downloading from iCloud after disabling sync

Hi!

So I recently enabled Messages in iCloud on all my devices, and got the "downloading messages" status for a while, but things seemed to sync up.

Before this, I was able to go through large attachments on my device, so I could delete whatever was hogging the space on my iPhone, but after enabling I realized that what it actually does is upload those attachments to iCloud - fine.

The problem comes when all my devices are using approx 100MB of storage for Messages while iCloud is using 8GB+!

I wanted to free up some space on my 50GB iCloud, because it is normally enough for my photos and documents, but I can't?!

There are two options;

1. Disable Messages under iCloud settings, this stops sync on the device

2. Disable and delete Messages under "administrate iCloud", which disables sync on all devices, deletes iCloud storage (30 days to recover) and starts downloading messages to the phone it was disabled on (if I understand correctly?).

I choose option 2, and afterwards deleted all local Messages data on iPad and and deleted the library on my Mac. The iPhone should now be the only device with Messages, so I can clean this up before I enable it again. The reason why, is because there are photos 2-3 years back that have been sent to me, which I might want to keep.

So the problem? iPhone storage says that Messages is hogging up almost 11GB of space, and suggests to enable "delete old conversations" etc to free up 3GB. The only problem is that I'd like to manually go through the attachments first - like I could before, large to small, but they're not there?! None of the attachments are listed.

It's as if the iPhone THINKS they are stored locally, but in reality they are still not downloaded from iCloud, and whenever I scroll up a conversation, they are probably still accessed directly from iCloud.

iPhone says Messages uses 11GB, and the details says 235MB for conversations, and Zero for the others (Gif, Video, Photos etc).

I have some screenshots of the issue if that helps.

I never got the "downloading messages from iCloud" message when I disabled. And when I then tried reenabling, they were immediately in iCloud again, and used storage on the phone was 100MB, "downloading messages" did not appear. Disabled again, same as before - 11GB, but data not there.

Left in on a charger and connected to Wifi overnight, nothing has been downloaded.