Trying my luck with an android phone question

So, I don't really expect much asking on here of all places but on the off-chance someone here might have any ideas... (maybe someone's special interest lol) I'm having issues with my phone storage and Googling hasn't seemed to help me like it usually would for troubleshooting this kind of stuff.

Basically, my phone is getting low on storage and it is saying I have most of my storage used in application data but when I click into that and actually look through the applications and count it all up it only adds up to just over 1GB so I don't know how or where this extra used storage is and how to get rid of it. It's been getting worse and worse, I've been deleting apps entirely over time to save space and the space I save just fills up somehow again to the point where I only have like a handful of small apps left and *still* no space. I can't find anything anywhere aside from general guides on saving space that I already know about like deleting unused apps, clearing cache etc. I've tried checking hidden files etc. and there's nothing I can find anywhere. It's like there's something invisible bloating out my storage that I just can't find.