For what it's worth, my hacky solution to this is this script which kills all the background processes that use significant bandwidth. If you're interested in how I came up with the list of processes, I can share the BitBar [1] script I wrote for monitoring per-process network usage (I wrote a small wrapper around nettop that logs to a db, which is read periodically by my BitBar script to show me the per-process usage:
(ps if having an easily installable version of this would be helpful to anyone reading this, please comment or upvote this and maybe I'll prioritize it :) )