Launching photoshop uses 60g

Can someone direct me to any recent information about this issue, or what I should be looking for? I'm struggling to find information about it, I'm not technical but I can usually dig in and figure out and fix something, and I've hit a wall. Maybe I don't know what to search for? I find comments alluding to it. I think I'm trying to find some kind of troubleshooting steps to narrow down if something in my OS has changed or where the problem could be. It seems other people have experienced it because I did find a suggestion to move the settings files. I obviously need them for what I'm working on, so I tried resetting my workspace and reimporting my presets but I'm having the same problem. Normally my next step would be to update photoshop but i'm intentionally one update behind and I don't dare since it seems to be a known bug in photoshop 26. 

This is a new issue, I used to be able to use illustrator and photoshop concurrently, super huge files without any problem, they never used more than the allocated 20g together and I never needed to reconfigured my disc space. Now I can't open moderately large files at all. I'm temporarily a little lower on storage than usual, but I have 80g of space available, and after starting photoshop I get disc notifications before I can even open a file, and I'm suddenly down to 7g. Launching illustrator in comparison uses 1g. I pushed the limits on disc space on my previous macbook a year ago and never experienced this, there's just no reason for it with my current specs and the type of files i'm working on. I opened absolutely enormous files full of smart objects weeks ago and now I can't open any of them. The idea of reconfiguring my SSD's for disc space makes me irrationally angry, I have plenty of virtual/external storage and my current allocation has never been a problem. 

I have auto updates off, but I wondered if somehow it was auto updated (I randomly lost all of my patterns a couple of weeks ago for the first time but didn't lose any of my brushes/palettes/other presets) so i went to check and now I'm confused because I can't launch creative cloud without turning on auto updates, and just last week I added adobe fonts and didn't see an update available. I'm about to do it but I'm paranoid because of my current problem. All of my other adobe apps were up to date last I checked in November. I don't even know what info is relevent, other than I cannot for the life of me figure out what is happening. I really struggle with this side of things but I can follow instructions! Please, if anyone can just send me in the right direction I would appreciate it.