I’m sure they can cut some of the fat away from the saves – I have my savegames folder compressed and it takes it down to about half alone. Definitely a lot of plaintext in there capable of being fixed. I’ve raised the issue with the devs though, suggesting a player defined number of autosave slots to their own liking.
(The game does overwrite old savegames – But due to the way they are named, you’ll still get one for every year of the game)
Drive wear really isn’t that bad though – Why you’d need to run this off of an SSD is a bit beyond me, but to each his own. 🙂