So just an update. I successfully reduced redis usage by switching to resque and resque scheduler which provided more ability to control how often redis was hit (via INTERVAL and RESQUE_SCHEDULER_INTERVAL env vars)
However, I still hit the 10k command limit for upstash free tier. I’ve concluded that even basic background processing in Rails to not be conducive to this free tier and have switched to Redis Cloud free tier instead which does not have a limit of # of commands but rather memory.