Well it looks like wiping my phone and restoring from iCloud has fixed my issue. I got all of my storage space back and then some and now when I go into my wife's message thread and tap on info, I can scroll down to the bottom and it shows X images in iCloud and a download button. Between my wife and a few others there's probably a couple thousand images so i'm not going to tap on download on any of them to save the space as its not necessary to have them actively on the device.
I notice that under iPhone storage that im back to not having the category breakdown of what's using what but i'm sure that will get fixed again with the next software update. Review large attachments only is showing a few random items but I'll take it.