I restarted iPhone, turned cellular on/off, connected to other WiFi’s, nothing fixed it :/

Right I get what you’re saying, but that’s not how I want to do it. I use another cloud service to store my images, as well as on an external hard drive as backup. The only reason I use iCloud is to see my photos on my desktop, as a mirror of my phone. I don’t want to use iCloud as the actual storage service because I’m using other services for that. Whether or not that’s efficient or not is irrelevant

Well the issue is that it doesn’t work lol. It used to and now it doesn’t. The sync is activated but it seems to be stuck somewhere in the digital process. Gonna have to reset it and hope for the best