Course loads can be some bullshit, like individually they seem reasonable and then you take 4/5 and just never have free time again.

Or you sign up for what should be a reasonable course load, only to find that a one credit elective course you need to do to graduate on time is insane, because your professor decides their course on Psychoanalysis of Medieval Mongolian Science Fiction is the most important thing you will ever take, eclipsing all your other courses combined and even the need to maintain housing and care for yourself. I've never had course loads as insane as when some professor gets butt hurt that they've been assigned to teach a class that is primarily taken as a one-off elective, and decides to make the students suffer with weekly multipage reports, 500+ pages of reading, quizzes every class, and weekly tests.

I had a professor for a philosophy gen ed survey class who couldn't figure out why people were dropping out like crazy, and the remainder were struggling to follow the course and stay on top of his weekly writing assignments. Said weekly writing assignments were only a few pages, but the problem was that we were assigned to comment on his PhD thesis on Kierkegaard, which included some fairly extensive passages of untranslated Ancient Greek and Latin text. It was way overboard for an introductory level class that was really supposed to just be a "Hey, so this is the Allegory of the Cave, next week we're going to talk about some Roman stuff, and then wrap up the semester talking about Descartes, followed by a brief warning to staying away from Hegel and post-Kantian German Idealism if you value your time and sanity."