Yeah. In a sense I'm used to it from years of playing on Giant maps with low sea levels, but it's still felt in various ways:
* Announcement spam. So many events happen that it's easy to miss the important ones, since only 4-5 are shown at a time, and there can be dozens or more a turn. That is, at least in the announcements shown at the top of the screen. I can still access the log, but not everything shows up there, and it's a hassle to figure out where the new one starts. and more of a hassle to do that every turn.
* A bunch of 1 or 2 city civs that exist in inhospitable lands (tundras, deserts, etc) and who's only gameplay impact is to make the game insufferable with demands, threats, and closed borders. They have no significance on the world stage, and on the small stage just offer annoyances. It does make the game world feel more alive, but not in a way that's worthwhile. They're just tedium.
* The constant churn of small civs asking for protection and then breaking away. Pretty sure that's been brought up before. It adds to the announcement spam, makes it annoying to track alliances, and completely discourages the player from every bothering with the protection mechanic because it's short longevity means the costs you pay into it won't bear fruit (at least for me, maybe others find it more useful than I do).
My goal with a limit would be to find a reasonable number where each civ on the map is a civ that adds to the game, and keeping the tundras/deserts, etc to barbarian cities or simply remaining uncivilizationed territory.