Old texts keep reappearing after iOS 26 update on my iPhone

Hello. Just got an iPhone 17 pro, but even shortly before that on my 14 pro, TONS of old text message conversations started coming back out of nowhere. I’m talking thousands. It may have been after I updated to 26. Not only are conversations that I deleted months ago reappearing, but when I delete a conversation and start a new one with someone, suddenly there are thousands of past texts in that conversation. Does anyone know why? It’s driving me nuts.

Also is this eating up iCloud storage?

I notice it’s saying “syncing with iCloud paused” in the messages app. Maybe the syncing is the issue? If I stop syncing messages to iCloud would that help? If yes, how do I do that? I can’t keep having to delete 100s of text strings.

Thank you.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: 1000s of texts reappearing. Please help.