Attempt to solve MacOS CI issues in GH Actions (#12013)

The MacOS CI in github actions often hangs without any logs. GH argues that
it's due to resource utilization, either running out of disk space, memory, or CPU
starvation, and thus the runner is terminated.

This PR contains multiple attempts to resolve this:
1. introducing pause_process instead of SIGSTOP, which waits for the process
  to stop before resuming the test, possibly resolving race conditions in some tests,
  this was a suspect since there was one test that could result in an infinite loop in that
 case, in practice this didn't help, but still a good idea to keep.
2. disable the `save` config in many tests that don't need it, specifically ones that use
  heavy writes and could create large files.
3. change the `populate` proc to use short pipeline rather than an infinite one.
4. use `--clients 1` in the macos CI so that we don't risk running multiple resource
  demanding tests in parallel.
5. enable `--verbose` to be repeated to elevate verbosity and print more info to stdout
  when a test or a server starts.