iPhone Storage Not Moving Much After Deleting Photos

So I have a phone with 250gb of storage and was kind of teetering towards it being maxed out recently.

With about 253gb of space taken up, I deleted roughly 72gb worth of photos/videos from the photos app, cleared the recently deleted folder, and thought it'd be good, but the phone hasn't seemed to reflect all the content gone.

Right now, there's about 228gb of space taken up, so about 25 of the 72gb have actually shown up when looking at the phone's storage. There's no massive "Other" space being occupied or anything like that, and when I turn the phone on/off, I was noticing some drops in space, but they come right back.

Do iPhones just allocate space weirdly? Was I never going to see an actual 70GB drop off, or is something wrong?

EDIT: iPhone model is 16 Pro Max, on iOS 18.3.1