Is iCloud drive archived on my local “Macintosh HD”?

My 500 Gb “Macintosh HD” has 18GB available. I running Monterey and about to update to Ventura. I’m running Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, and BackBlaze.

• In the last week, I’ve uploaded two folders of photos to iCloud Drive each containing about 40GB.
• I expected to see my available space increase to 98GB (The 18 reported plus 40 + 40 for the two folders.)

A thread from Nov 2020 (iCloud Files Taking up Hard Drive Space - Apple Community) described macOS as “archiving” iCloud uploads on the local disk for 30 days.

• Am I constrained to waiting for 25 more days to see if the local drive starts to “free up”?
• Is there documentation that I can read that gives a broader description of what is going on ?
• Is there a way that I can force all iCloud uploads to occur and then free up what appears to be an archive?