Man... Exception Caught, SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access violation: 1461

Hello EE Community, Just this morning, an exception appeared when accessing any page on our site, even the admin control. Here is the exception text:

• Exception Caught SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access violation: 1461 Can’t create more than max_prepared_stmt_count statements (current value: 16382): SELECT LOWER(module_name) AS module_name, module_version, has_cp_backend, module_id FROM (exp_modules) ee/legacy/database/drivers/mysqli/mysqli_connection.php:117

(I can add the stack trace if are interested)

What is strange is that there were no changes to the environment, the site, or its content. We also have a dev instance that points to a different DB and still the same issue. We even rolled back to a full server snapshot of 2 days ago when it was certainly working fine. We also tried to update PHP to 7.3 and no change. We are on EE v5.3.2.

Could all of this point to too many resources on our DB server and EE not gracefully degrading? Is there something we are missing or do you have ideas of what to check next?

Thank you in advance for any ideas you may have 😊 -Reid