We were in a similar situation. We had a POC instance of Jira that had, at one point, 40 admins so you can imagine it was quite a mess. There were SO MANY custom fields, many duplicated. And don't get me started on the number of statuses and workflows.
What we ended up doing was just what you said - we spun up a new instance of Jira. That was simple enough and it was so nice getting to start over again with a fresh, clean install.
However, we had to migrate our issues from the POC instance to the new instance. That was not so simple. Atlassian recommends taking a backup from one instance and restoring to another. But since ours was such a mess, that was not an option. We had to migrate project by project.
We tried every add-on there was to sync the 2 instances. That required us to babysit every sync job as each one would throw errors for many different reasons. A migration that should have taken 4 weeks took us 17.
My advice to you is that if you only need the old data for reference and don't need it in Jira, export it to Excel, spin up your new instance and start fresh. Otherwise, I would recommend cleaning up the current instance.
You can spin up your new instance from here https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/try but will need to create a new URL for it. Don't forget to cancel your old subscription once you have everything you need.
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