I noticed at the start of the final act that my save folder had ballooned to 4.2 GB which seemed a bit outrageous to me. After a bit of digging, I found that for some reason if you play on 2 separate machines (steam deck and a desktop PC for example), the game was failing to replace your old saves with the new ones when switching, rather syncing the new saves made while leaving the old ones in place.
After manually deleting the saves and setting quick and auto save limits at 5, cloud syncing is infinitely faster due to a vastly reduced size. You do have to go in and delete all your old saves each time you swap platforms unfortunately, but this is at least a work around for those like myself who don't want to feel stuck only playing on one platform. It also makes the cloud syncing (at least through steam, I have the in game cloud sync option disabled) far less time consuming.
Being relatively new to the self hosted experience and still working through how everything in an arr setup interacts, along with what issues can occur and how to troubleshoot/fix them, this sounds incredibly useful. I'll definitely be looking into integrating this into my own setup and providing feedback when I can!