why is my xml sitemap generator killing crawl budget?

hey everyone, so we run this 'Free XML Sitemap Generator' tool and it's been a lifesaver for smaller sites, but i'm completely stuck on a persistent issue with larger client sites. for some reason, when our tool generates sitemaps for these massive websites, they end up being absolutely huge, sometimes hitting the 50,000 URL limit per file way too fast, or just generating so many files that it feels like we're just hammering googlebot. it's really starting to impact their actual crawl budget an, honestly, our own server resources to. we're trying to improve overall crawl efficiency for these giants, but it feels like we're fighting an uphill battle.

we've tried everything i can think of, like breaking the sitemaps into smaller chunks by date or content type, and i've even tinkered with the generation settings to prioritize more important pages, but it's just not enough. for sites with hundreds of thousands or even millions of pages, the process is still so resource-intensive and i'm worried we're doing more harm than good by exhausting their crawl budget with these massive sitemap updates. has anyone dealt with optimizing xml sitemap generation for truly enormous websites without completely destroying their search engine crawl budget? what strategies or configurations have worked for you guys? help a brother out please...