How do you stop a markdown second brain from growing forever?

My second brain is plain markdown: one file per project, tied together by a router file and a STATE file. To keep it in check I added a lint that gives every file a word budget. If a file stays over budget for 7 days, the warning becomes an error.

My fix right now is a split. The over-budget part moves into its own file that opens with a "read this only when" line, and the router gets a line pointing to it. That way a session only opens what the task actually needs.

I'm curious whether that's the right long-term move. How do you keep yours from growing forever? Do you split like this, archive old stuff, summarise it, or just let search handle it? And if you've switched approaches, what made you drop the first one?

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How do you stop a markdown second brain from growing forever?