And that's why I added a crontab entry that periodically purges my cron configuration. That way, I'm forced to readd only the truly necessary cron jobs, successfully reducing the amount of crontab entries.

Which can be solved by an additional server.

Boom, problem solved.

Yes. The strongest crontab entries will probably restore themselves. (For anyone reading along, this is sarcasm. Don't do this.)

This is the way. Exactly what we did + migrated 80% of everything to k8s cronjobs and Argo workflows

Make the rule start a secondary cron system. Otherwise it won't run after you erase the crontab.

Crontab is a really badly designed program that we just can't fix because everybody depends on its WFTs for something.