Static files being served from the Django app instead of Nginx

My website serves the static files from the Django app instead of the Nginx staticfiles folder but I can’t figure out why.

My Django app static is on the (Linode) server at:

/var/www/DjangoApp/myapp/static/myapp

The server static folder is at:

/var/www/html/staticfiles/myapp

Here’s my settings.py:

STATIC_URL = '/static/'
STATIC_ROOT = '/var/www/html/staticfiles/'

Here’s my urls.py:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path,include
from django.contrib.staticfiles.urls import staticfiles_urlpatterns

urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    path('',include('myapp.urls')),
]

urlpatterns += staticfiles_urlpatterns()

Here’s my config file at /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default:

server {
    server_name helpmesaythis.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://172.105.76.53:8000;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    }

    location /static/ {
        root /var/www/html/staticfiles;
    }

    listen [::]:443 ssl http2 ipv6only=on; # managed by Certbot
    listen 443 ssl http2; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/helpmesaythis.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/helpmesaythis.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
    include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot
}

server {
    if ($host = helpmesaythis.com) {
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
    } # managed by Certbot

    listen 80;
    server_name helpmesaythis.com;
    return 404; # managed by Certbot
}

I have restarted/reloaded Nginx and I have been using collectstatic without success.

I have also tried the following changes to the default file:

location /static {
        root /var/www/html/staticfiles;
    }

location /static/ {
        alias /var/www/html/staticfiles;
    }

location /static {
        alias /var/www/html/staticfiles;
    }

I have also tried putting the location /static/ section above the location / section, just in case.

When I go to the staticfiles folder at /var/www/html/staticfiles/myapp there are a few files in their from when I first put the project on the server a few months ago, however none of the static files since then have gone in.

I only realised that this was happening recently when I saw that the audio files on my site were served as HTTP/1.1 instead of HTTP/2.

EDIT: I tried to open the following static file:

https://helpmesaythis.com/static/myapp/flag-spain.webp

And I got a 404 error. The Nginx error log states the following:

2023/03/27 14:59:10 [error] 18795#18795: *297 open() "/var/www/html/staticfilesmyapp/flag-spain.webp" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 181.237.132.46, server: helpmesaythis.com, request: "GET /static/myapp/flag-spain.webp HTTP/2.0", host: "helpmesaythis.com"

It makes sense as there is nothing in the server static folder as python3 manage.py collectstatic only collects the static files in the Django app directory.