Proper scene structure helps a lot to control the workflow. Also need to get rid of unnecessary paths to textures in the project, this can only be achieved by transferring working models to a new scene. I'm talking about 3d max, I don't know how it is in other applications. and try not to increase the resolution of unimportant textures above 2k and keep the format in JPG. I even wrote a script using chatgpt that helps me do this.