Have you considered downloading a script that lets you reorder your reviews and using that to throttle the daily reviews you’re tackling so that you’re only reviewing a small portion of those items at a time?
You could set it to give you all of your apprentice level reviews first, for example, and then guru, then master etc. That way, you would still be able to hit those 4 hour and 8 hour review intervals on those items and move them along to the next SRS stages without them getting buried in a massive pile.
If you did this, you could just aim for doing a consistent (and reasonable) number of daily reviews, like 100 or so a day, and you would gradually get through the pile without having to spend the whole time fighting the SRS and your own memory.
Many of the higher level reviews will drop back down to apprentice and guru, but as long as you’re clearing the apprentice and guru items first every day, you shouldn’t get too swamped by the higher level stuff coming back, and if you stay consistent with the number of reviews you do every day, eventually your WK reviews will resume a more normal pattern instead of coming back in huge clumps.
I believe the most robust reorder script is currently this one: