Either not pleased or confused with iCloud Data

The saga starts out with the idea of using iCloud Data for my raw camera images. Apple offers cloud storage for $5 per terabyte-month which is as cheap as BackBlaze. So I thought I would experiment and I signed up for the 2TB service and pulled over about 800GB of data into a folder in iCloud Drive (which has since been removed). For a long time, I could see about 1 MB/s being uploaded to the cloud and that stopped after about a day. The 4TB disk had about 100G of free space which is why I stopped the loading of data onto the laptop.

When I opened a Finder window and click the partially filled pie icon I got something similar to below but the numbers were 200G out of 1.2T but it wasn't changing. There was nothing being uploaded according to iStat Menu. I let it sit for a few days and it didn't change. So... I deleted the data in iCloud Drive. It still didn't change -- still said it needed to uploaded about 1.2T. A reboot didn't change anything.

I then went to iCloud settings and went back to my 50G at $0.99 per month setting. I've also done a Time Machine backup as well as turned off automatic TM backups hoping to get the space from the snapshots back but that hasn't happened either.

1.7TB of the space in the disk is being consumed in /System/Volumes/Data/Users/pedz/Library/Application Support/CloudDocs/session/i 

At some point, I don't recall when, the fly-out for the iCloud progress changed its numbers but there it still has some to upload and it is still not uploading anything. It has been in that state for half a day now.

What I'd like is for iCloud to upload to the cloud as fast as possible. Utopia, of course, would be a way for me to govern the speed of the upload and download.

Is there a way to say "Hey!... I'd like to have 2TB of free space on my drive. Can you do that as quickly as possible?" so I could continue loading the data without fear that the disk will fill up. I know of at least one application that deals with the VR movies produced by my Canon camera. It must go out and ask "how much free space do you have?" and when the reply is too small, it doesn't even try to start the conversion I asked for but just says "You don't have enough free space".

Have others bumped into similar issues and figured out how to work with iCloud Data in a more controlled manner?