Interesting, IIRC I did free up quite a bit of disk space when I removed all the clones, but I also deleted a lot of other stuff that time so I could be mistake

Interesting, IIRC I did free up quite a bit of disk space when I removed all the clones, but I also deleted a lot of other stuff that time so I could be mistaken. du(1) being unaware of APFS clones makes it hard to tell.