I find that the Player.log file tends to grow extremely large (2.6GB after a few hours of play), clogging up my harddrive. Is there a way to disable its creation?

this is just a wild idea and is not guaranteed to work, but i would try creating an empty Player.log file and then use whatever your OS does to make it read-only (right-click in windows, use chmod on macOS/linux). there's a chance that the game will just give up trying to write to that file and not write anything at all.