Spotlight is the powerful search engine built into MacOS that allows you to quickly find any file or data on your Mac disk drives. Part of what makes Spotlight so fast is that it uses caches and temporary files during indexing to quickly refer to data on your Mac, but sometimes those Spotlight files can take up unusually large amounts of disk storage space. Spotlight metadata consuming a very large amount of disk space can happen randomly and has been reported by many Mac users over time, and though some of these issues were first noticed during beta development of MacOS system software, the bloated Spotlight metadata issue has persisted for some users into the stable builds of MacOS, including Sequoia.