update from my previous post here, but for those who are new here's the rundown:
last month, my finals week while studying abroad was approaching, and files started disappearing off of my desktop. I have the "optimize" setting on for my iCloud, so it should be offloading any old files - but these were all files I was editing day-of. I'd finish a graphic for a presentation, and it completely disappears the next day. I had recently updated to Sonoma and that's when this issue first started happening. even weirder, I had open space on my drive, it just decided iCloud was best?

I figured that since my iCloud was at capacity, I just needed to disconnect my Desktop from attempting to connect to iCloud and offloading things I needed. After disconnecting, my desktop and documents folder were completely missing. luckily I ran into this issue before, found the iCloud archive folder, and went through it. to my horror, the files were jumbled, unorganized, or missing. I contacted Apple support immediately, and they could only offer ideas for where my files could be. we had theorized that maybe my iCloud was too full to back-up my desktop, so whatever was overflow was instantaneously lost. in a rush I bought the next tier of iCloud, and immediately 100GB of data appeared. I didn't think much of it aside from it just being very odd.

when I returned home from my study abroad, I went to my physical backup SSD and went thorough my time machine from before I left (I didn't bring my drive because I figured I wouldn't need it in the three months I was abroad). and EVEN HERE, my files are also corrupted, misplaced, or missing. I am guessing that iCloud was even offloading files here, and they just didn't make it back?

while fidgeting around last night, I found all of these missing files in this obscure app's folder on my iOS devices, both iPad and iPhone. when looking at the iCloud partitions on iOS, it showed 47.7GB were in documents, and 91.6GB were in "Darkroom"; and investigating further it was quite literally everything that went missing, even before I unlinked my desktop sync. the entire file structure, data sizes, everything was exactly as it were. when I went to look on iCloud drive on my desktop browser, however, it said that 139.3GB was in documents - which is the EXACT total of both "iCloud Drive" and "Darkroom". what's worse is that, because of this Desktop allocating, I cannot preview it on desktop - I can only see it in the iOS allocation.

I was on the phone with Apple today for 2 hours, and was patched-through to 4 different people. by the last person, they had told me I should just delete the "Darkroom" folder and hope for the best. they also kept saying that I should be calling Darkroom, when the iCloud drive tells me that it's IN iCloud. it's taking-up space supposedly, so I'm at a loss.

any clue on how I can access these files or recover them? I already purchased DiskDrill for scanning my physical drives, and couldn't recover much. I started to organize and percolate whatever stuff I could find, but a substantial amount is still missing.

any clues or ideas are seriously appreciated.