I lost nearly 30 GB of storage in 3 days by doing nothing

About three days ago I posted about constant storage bloat from my M1 Air's system data in sequoia. Then it was at about 80 GB remaining, today it's at about 55 GB remaining. I have since turned off Spotlight both via the settings menu, as well as using some Spotlight terminal commands, and tried to find other tasks that might be contributing to this.

I also have never used Time Machine or backups for this machine, so there's no large snapshots loaded of my hard drive anywhere on my system (I have checked). At the time of this screenshot, my trash bin is completely empty (and usually stays that way).

As you could see in the attached screenshot, I use minimal storage space while system data continues to blow up.

Also, for some odd reason Apple podcasts is constantly running in my CPU services while the app isn't even opened on the device (As shown in the attached screenshot). It was also contributing to a lot of disk writes/reads, but ever since I have forced closed that process, it has not returned.

What can I do other than backing up, wiping the storage, and reinstalling the OS? That is something I unfortunately had to do back when I was a PC user. Otherwise, this is quite absurd. I have seen this issue in several places online and even in this forum. I have yet to find a solid solution because whenever you do deactivate Spotlight functions, some storage will be replenished, but it inevitably comes back… and with a vengeance.