The premise is simply that tags are expensive, and pooling is good, and to some point that's correct.
Since you're just using "simple tags", the pooling may seem onerous, but it's a "one size fits all" kind of strategy, for better or worse.
Clearly you have an edge case because of the size of your objects.
But the solution is, perhaps a bit distasteful, simply to call <c:set ... > at the end of the page with a very small, or null object to free up the handle.
The variable doesn't matter, just calling c:set will clear it out.
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