Have you tried the crawler.workers.pool_size.limit config?
From the reference config file:
# The number of parallel crawls allowed per instance of Enterprise Search.
# By default, it is set to 2x the number of available logical CPU cores.
# Note: On Intel CPUs, the default value is 4x the number of physical CPU cores
# due to hyper-threading (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading).
#
#crawler.workers.pool_size.limit: N
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