The underpinnings of iCloud Drive have changed in Sonoma. You should enable Optimise Mac Storage. Then "Remove Download" (to make a folder/file cloud only) and "Download Now" (to make file/folder always local) can be used in the Finder context menu. It is no longer a big mess and will do what you want.
Yes, Apple did.
Exactly this. The previous way was confusing and anomalours because you could have Optimise off and still manually evict files, making them Optimised…leaving a situation where Optimise was off, implying all files had full size local versions….which wasn’t the case.
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