Project File Size Grows Consuming RAM and Locking Machine

Across several productions I've worked on I've come across this issue (working primarily on narrative fiction feature films):

My personal workflow involves me 'versioning up' sequences as I work so that I have past edits readily available if I need to reference something I've done before, or if I get a note to revert back to something I had previously, etc. Typically I'll break the film down into 10-15 'beats' comprised of several scenes each, with each 'beat' having it's own sequence that I am versioning up as I get feedback and make changes. So, as I'm increasing the number of sequences in my project, the proj file size increases proportiontely (always by several MB more than I'd expect as I'm not duplicating any media, just sequences, which seems odd to me, but anyway it makes sense that the project file increases as I'm adding more data to the project).

My issue is: as my project file grows in size it will get to a certain point where 2 operations - opening the project and saving the project - suddenly begin to consume enormous amount of RAM, sometimes asking for upwards of 80GB. This locks up my machine and then the project will become unworkably sluggish until I reboot my machine and go through the process again. My current workaround is just to eventually delete older sequences from my current project until the file size is manageable again. If I need to refer back to older work I then have to dig into older project files. So all this said, here are my questions:

TECHNICAL:

-is this a common or known issue that having a large project file size will destroy your RAM usage (specifically on opening / saving operations) to the extent I'm describing? Or does this sound more like a bug or hardware issue on my end?

WORKFLOW

-This is subjective, but does my workflow of versioning up and keeping multiple sequences in one project sound strange? Do people have best practices for managing large productions while keeping project file sizes low? I personally really prefer to keep as much as I can in one proj file, as jumping around to older files seems counter-intuitive and less organized to me, but is that just what most people do?

Specs:

-I'm operating on a 2021 M1 Max Macbook Pro | 32GB RAM | 10 Core CPU | 24 Core GPU > operating on the latest version of Premiere 23.6.0 (Build 65)

-For what it's worth I have zero tech issues using large quantities of media, exporting renders, handling multiple layers of high res graphics, etc. Only hurdle I've run into with this machine is this RAM usage on large project files.