I am quite new to Cosmos SDK stuff, but I previously (and ongoing) have worked on btcsuite/btcd and there is a parameter you can set in the configuration that regulates the target numbers and maximum numbers of peers.
I think it also depends in some part on the peers you connect to - if they have some limit set then you can’t connect to them while their threshold is met.
Also, something else, bear in mind that Tendermint uses epidemic transmission and these kinds of numbers are typical in epidemic protocols, it reduces the message work per node while achieving the same rate of propagation, and defends against partitioning by nodes shuffling their peers periodically and randomly.