Change from LrD to LR Classic

Could you please clarify.

Do you have a subscription to the Adobe Photography Plan which consists of the following applications, Photoshop, Lightroom Classic (LrC), Lightroom (Lr) desktop cloud based, and Lr Mobile applications?
Note there is no longer a current application known as Lightroom CC.

In my signature line below you will see the current version numbers of the latest updates. What version numbers are you using?

I'm afraid that there isn't a perfect solution. I can think of 3 alternative methods, but each have their weaknesses:

1. I know you don't like the thought of doing it, but exporting "as original" on a per album basis at least allows you to maintain all metadata and if you name the output folders with the name of the album, you can easily recreate the album structure when you subsequently import those output folders into a new LrC catalog. Basically, you'd select all the folders and use the option to create collections from those folders (so they'd have the same name and same image content as your previous albums). The downside is that you may have had images in more than one album, so you'd end up with physical duplicates on your hard drive. 

2. Use the Adobe Lightroom Downloader, which downloads all images in your cloud account to a local hard drive which would supposedly be complete with existing edits and other metadata. However, the last time I tested the Downloader there were significant gaps in the metadata, which may or may not have been fixed yet. However, that could be tested and rejected if found to be lacking (the data would still be in the cloud). But even assuming that all the metadata is included, the biggest drawback would be the fact that the files are automatically downloaded into a capture date-based folder structure, so all album membership information would be lost. The only practical way around that would be to first add keywords to all the images in the cloud, one for each album the image is in. Done on a per album basis (i.e. select an album, select all images in that album, apply an appropriate keyword to all selected images in one go), that might not be as daunting as it sounds. But you would have to check the downloader files to ensure that added keyword is included.

3. The possibly best option would be to create a new LrC catalog and set it to sync. That will automatically download all images in the cloud as full copies of the originals. Also it would retain the album membership, i.e. creating collections in LrC with the same name and content as the albums in the cloud. The biggest downside to this method is the fact that keywords and location data do not sync (although any GPS coordinates would sync), so if you've been keywording and adding location data in the cloud, you'd have to redo that work in the LrC catalog. One other thing to be aware of should you decide to use this method is that the default storage location for the downloaded images is an obscure "Mobile Downloads" package in your Pictures folder on the internal drive. So before enabling sync in the new Classic catalog, visit the LrC Preferences (Settings if running Ventura)>Lightroom Sync tab and set the location to your own choosing, and I'd also suggest selecting one of the standard Lightroom capture date-based folder structures.