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Indeed, and that's under the user account which goes to the system drive regardless.
If you're low on space, the problem isn't the installed program files. That's not where you save space. What you need to watch is the user account. All your applications dump a lot of stuff here, and it tends to accumulate over time. Some of it can be redirected to other drives, much of it can't.
Just as an example, the Bridge cache goes to the user account by default. If you're a heavy user, this can grow to many tens of gigabytes right there. Luckily, this is one of those things that you can point elsewhere.
People think of a system directory as something static. In reality, there's constant read/write activity. The net sum is usually positive, meaning it grows. And most of it is under your user account.
A "standard" configuration of operating system and a range of applications shouldn't take up much more than around 90-120 GB. If there's much more than that, it's time for housecleaning.
It sounds like you may need to download the free and excellent WinDirStat. It shows you exactly what's filling up your drive, and where it is:
Am I reading this correctly that WinDirStat says I'm only using about 8% of C-drive?
This is what it shows for my C-drive in Explorer properties window.
Well, I thought about looking here (just a more convenient at-a-glance view) -
- but drive properties will show the same. You have used 90 GB of your 214 GB available. That's fine, and a comfortable fill level, although you probably have a few things there that could be cleaned out or directed elsewhere.
I still think you could put your applications here. Everything just operates more smoothly that way.
Note in the screenshot above that I have used 124 GB, with 6 "heavy" CC applications installed, plus MS Office and other bits and pieces. That's mainly because I have left the Bridge cache here. If I put that on a different drive, that would instantly free up 35 GB in my case. So in reality, I have OS and applications at roughly 90 GB.
That leaves one crucial consideration: the Photoshop scratch disk. In my case, there's still room for that on the system drive, with secondary scratch assigned to another drive.
In your case, you can still have primary scratch here, but you absolutely need to have a secondary scratch volume handy. So the question is what you have available. It should ideally be a fast drive like NVMe, and you should have at least a couple of hundred GB available.
The point I'm trying to make is that program files don't really make up a very large part of the total. It's a fairly small piece of the puzzle. With some sensible planning, you can make this work.
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