Comment by p_ing

Reread my comment. Yes, macOS (or ARM, here) wastes memory. For every 1KiB page you have, you're wasting 15KiB of memory.

That's just how this works. It's a performance vs. efficiency tradeoff.

And there's nothing special about your workload. It's small in comparison to many others that many other OSes on many other ISAs, including Windows & x86 w/ AWE, have been running for quite some time with no issue.