Notes storage on iPhone is Huge - phone reports it to be 105GB!

Does anyone really know why the Notes App reports that it is using so much memory? I have 6,974 notes in iCloud and lots of them do have attachments (mostly scans of receipts - I used to use Evernote and exported/imported the data into notes last weekend). On my iMac original Evernote exports are around 3.8GB, when I use the iMac to interrogate my iCloud storage the Notes storage is reported to be 2.7GB; and yet, on my iPhone, the "Settings > General > iPhone Storage" Notes is reported as being 104.35GB. And it jumps around in usage - sometime 54GB, sometime 75GB, but mostly 105.35GB.

This cannot possibly be right - there just isn't that much data in the iCloud for Notes.

The phone is an iPhone SE (2nd Ed) with 256GB storage

iOS Version 16.5

I keep reading about massive usage reported in Notes on the internet... but no one seems to have an answer? Did everyone just give up and move to another application? Is there a solution? Or, is it just that Notes in iOS is reporting incorrectly to the Storage setting?