Media Encoder using too much memory

Not sure how to resolve this, but ME takes up gobs of memory during the encoding process no matter what I seem to do to alleviate it in Premiere. You can see screenshots below (but total memory was up to 98.63 GB when it finished). 

In general, I've been trying to export a 1-hour long video. Originally shot on iPhone (.mov) and encoding to MP4. My system would either crash after an hour or so of encoding. I think converted the MOVs to MP4s and tried that approach before encoding, but same issue. I had to cut the video to 30 minutes just to get an export to work. There has to be a way to improve the memory usage on my system for this task.

I'm running an M2 Mac, 24 GB, Ventura (can't upgrade just yet). I had all applications closed and only using ME. I was also using Hardware encoding (Metal). I tried Software encoding but it crashed on that as well (and 10 times longer to encode). I even tried medium bitrate but didn't make much difference.

It seems like ME is super inefficient with memory use. I know there must be something else that can be done because I'm clearly not the only person trying to create 1-hour content. Thoughts?