Ah! I think I understand. After you place the images, press Command-Option-C or choose Object > Fitting > Fit Frame to Content. Does that work?

It’s not always super easy/pretty, but this works:
https://creativepro.com/updating-bits-of-text-across-multiple-documents.php

But that isn’t just a table; that was a huge very complicated table with thousands of strokes on each page.
Maybe you could simplify the table? Or maybe you could try making the table on its own page, then exporting it as a PDF and placing that PDF into your document (so it is a single graphic that is repeated for each page). I’m not sure if that will work. Or maybe create it with lines in a grid instead of table strokes.

Try doing it without the background grid pattern, and see how big the file is.

I usually use paragraph styles rather than text anchors. But it works fine. If you want the x-ref to point to the text anchor, you need to choose “Text Anchor” from the “Link To” pop-up menu at the top of the New Cross-Reference dialog box, and also choose “Text Anchor Name & Page Number” from the Format pop-up menu in the middle of the dialog box.

I’ll try to write this up with illustrations as a blog post soon.

One idea: You could place the InDesign document into a different (smaller) InDesign document two times, and crop it down. (Yes, you can place one InDesign document into another. It acts like a graphic.)

This might help:
https://creativepro.com/auto-reflowing-images-in-a-grid.php