iCloud to External Hard Drive

I have about 700+ GB of storage taken up in my iCloud drive. Most of which being, videos, photos on from my iPhone and some movies / documents I've left in my computer in which, eventually uploaded to my iCloud.

Now,

the way I have my iCloud set up on my computer is to my desktop. Basically anything I drop on the desktop is subject to get automatically uploaded to the iCloud drive. [being that my computer only has about 30 GB of free space - un-purgeable space, this space is taken up by essential apps I need on my computer]

Which lead me to my first resolution which is to download each file, bit by bit then drag from my internal hard drive, then drag and drop into to the external, then purge then, rinse to repeat. Not only would this be tedious but it's likely this process would take me weeks... [being how slow iCloud reacts to uploading and downloading - must be internet speed but who knows really, just takes an exhaustive amount time]

So I thought,

is there a way to skip this attentive, time consuming process and have everything download directly to the external drive instead? [like google drive simply does from its browser]

I think this is a big problem if there isn't an alternative.

Being that most of their products don't offer as much space within a reasonable, price range out of box. I haven't found any resources online that have directed me into a clearer alternative to this and... Apple support didn't tell me what to do, it seemed as if I created the solution for them as I was on the phone, explaining my problem then telling them my own solution to their problem.

Thank you ahead of time for all of your responses, I do hope that apple makes things easier for us to organize ourselves, our work, our lives has they always have made their efforts to.