I feel your pain on the constant endpoint calling… I have a Discord bot that polls the /streams endpoint periodically to announce live streams in discord… and it seems that having it run the checks with 2 minutes between the calls has been rather efficient (and the bot tracks over 4.5k unique channels, 500 unique games)… the announcements typically are sent to the appropriate channels within 3-5 minutes of the streamer going live, and I feel that’s a relatively fair delay…
and if your site is on LAMP, you could easily enough set a CRON task and never have to worry about it again (unless the API changes from v5)… you can call up to 100 channels per request and the guideline is 1 request per second… so for 11000 channels, what is that, a hair less than 2 minutes to make all the calls… that does not seem unreasonable at all