‘Other System Data’ using more than half my iPhone disk space

I’m not sure how to replicate this, but it seems a lot of other people have had this issue without a solution that works. I’ve had this iPhone for about 4 years and it’s in great condition, my last iPhone5s lasted me even longer until the battery gave out. But my phone’s System Data— specifically “Other System Data” is now taking up over half my phone’s disk space. It’ll get to the point that it’s preventing me from taking pictures, automatically uninstalling my apps, and making my phone crash over and over until I can manage to unlock my phone without it crashing and delete some pictures. Sometimes there’s so little space after a crash that my phone can’t even load the icons for my apps in order to function. Even then, sometimes there’s so little space that I can’t fully delete pictures (from recently deleted) and I’ll have to restart my phone to get just a tiny bit of space to actually delete things and get a little space. However, even when I clear up any space on my phone by deleting apps and pictures, the system data quickly fills in that empty space over the next day or so until my phone is crashing again. I saw someone say you need to restart your phone, that does not work. Others said don’t worry about it, and your phone will clear it as it needs space— it does NOT do this. I have to clear space manually by deleting the things I use my phone for, and the System Data will proceed to take up MORE space. It’s becoming so so frustrating, and almost feels like I’m being forced to buy a new phone (which I can’t afford) when this one is still in great physical condition.

I have very few apps I use at this point, and I have to take several photos everyday for work (which I delete everyday because of this issue). The phone is almost unusable like this. I even backed up my photos recently in case I need to wipe everything from my phone, but there’s not enough space on my phone to upload a full backup to iTunes, apparently.

It seems like there’s something fundamentally wrong with the system. What’s up???

This has been a problem for me for at least a year now.

Heres a picture— my System Data is taking up almost 40 GB of the 64 GB I have: (a screenshot of a screenshot, because I don’t have enough space to download the full quality original screenshot I took a few days ago 🙃)

[Re-Titled by Moderator]