Confusion on storage - LR Classic vs Cloud Based?

I wanted to move from lightroom (cloud based) to LRC but its proving to be really frustrating. I had all my photos and albums setup, things seemed fine but when I later accessed LR from my phone I noticed it would not allow me to export full quality images (and an "error" saying only smart preview is available). 

I also noticed that when I told LRC to sync with lightroom, it completely nuked all my albums in lightroom cloud rather than just mirror it. I was livid and  really irritated by this.

I have plenty of local storage and I like the additional small features in LRC... but it seems like if I want my full quality RAW's backed up and accessible on adobe cloud, I need to ALSO upload them into LR Cloud based as well? 

I presently have google drive automatically backing up my LRC folder, but this doesnt help me with the mobile editing piece. 

Am I doing something wrong? Im pretty tech savvy but maybe Im just ignorant to something. Its annoying that I need to have both applications installed to achieve this. 

Im running the latest version of both applications with with a Windows 10 desktop PC and an iPhone 14 Pro Max.