Creating space on my iPhone with iCloud

I am getting ready to go on a vacation and I would like to create space on my iPhone11 for more pictures. I'd like clean out my phone. I current sync everything to iCloud and should have a good backup of all my photos. However I want to remove photos on my phone and not affect copies in iCloud. How do I do that?

Now I think I understand the new process where the source location of my photos are now located in iCloud and what I'm looking at on my iphone is merely a link to the iCloud source. Which if I could I would want to put it back to where... originals are located on my iphone and only copies located in iCloud. If there was a way to do that again, I wouldn't be asking the above question. Because I would be control and would dictate which pics I want to offload to iCloud. Not the opposite.

But wait.., after writing this, I'm wondering if I am correct and that the source is now located in the cloud and all I have are links in my phone (as noted with the download-from-the-cloud-icon) ... then my phone should be able to "hold" a lot more pictures and I really don't need to "offload" anything anymore. Correct?

Appreciate any help.

Thanks!