Unreferenced repo data are not deleted

We are using GitLab free plan. We decided to have an orphan branch for our project. Later on, we decided to delete the orphan branch from the remote as it was adding too much to the repo size. But the removal of the orphan branch did not reduce the size of the repo, not even running housekeeping. I recently did a force push to the repo with a different history from the repo, hoping that unreferenced data on the remote would be deleted, but that just added to the whole size of the repo. We are only in need of issues and wiki because we used the project for the issues and wiki in the first place, and we have other local and remote backups. How can we go about reducing the size of the repo?