iCloud files not syncing?

Software
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I had to sign out on my Mac because I wanted to update my Apple ID so it deleted all the files from iCloud Drive and after I signed in, the only 2 folders there are: Desktop, Documents. Both have the cloud icon saying “Waiting to Upload”.
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After a while I disabled iCloud Drive in the System Preferences and it told me that the files would be copied to a folder on my home folder called “iCloud Drive (Archive)”.
To my surprise, when I checked that folder, it indeed had a lot of my old files (not all, because it seems like it was syncing (?)), but it’s weird that they were not showing up on my actually iCloud Drive folder.

I tried restarting the Mac, no luck. I created an empty folder and that seemed like it was uploaded, because the cloud icon was gone, but when I went to iCloud online, the folder is not there.
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It sucks that iCloud is such a flawed feature compared to the competition (even without the competition, it just feels sloppy most of the time). There’s no progress bar (in my case, I can’t even see the circle next to iCloud Drive:
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but the fact that it created the Archive folder with files and folders inside, seems to be syncing, it just doesn’t show the progress and it doesn’t add files that were already downloaded.

Any clue what’s happening and what to do?

EDIT: According to this reply, it seems that Affinity may cause issues (I couldn’t read what’s on the link’s page, because I guess I would need to log in, but I have indeed Affinity Designer and it was checked to sync via iCloud). I unchecked other apps as well and when I did that, it seemed to start syncing
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So maybe I guess we should uncheck all the options there to start with and once all files/folders are synced, start checking the other boxes as needed?
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2

iCloud can take a long, long, long time to sync. Sometimes, no joke, you can measure it with the Calendar app. My suggestion is to walk away and check back tomorrow. If it isn’t finished syncing you should at least see some progress.

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3

Running killall bird in the terminal on a Mac sometimes helps to unstick iCloud, but not always.

iCloud seems to mostly work okay for CloudKit apps that sync via their own databases, but for syncing files in folders it’s not very reliable, and for mysterious reasons it likes to remove local files from iOS and then redownload them when you open a app to use them, which can take an unpredictably long time.

I tried to sync Logseq with iCloud and it was a nightmare. There are also a lot of complaints among those who use it to sync Obsidian, which is one of the reasons I pay for Obsidian Sync.

Imo, iCloud may be Apple’s worst product/service, and it’s made much worse because they make it impossible to replace it with another cloud service on iPhones and iPads.

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