As far as I know I'm afraid so.... smart grouping of the layers and the use of (font) styles is sort of a must for these amounts of labels. When I need many labels, I group them per region and per type (e.g city, mountain, forest), so I can switch visibility on/off per group and apply style-changes per group. This way performance can be kept under control. But if there's better options I'd be curious as well! cheers, DJ