Should I be concerned if iCloud in my iPhone 14 Pro Max has 97,000 saved text messages?

Define "bad". Do you mean is it too many, are you concerned about something else? Mainly, it will take up a lot of iCloud storage space, and probably isn't very easy to search. One would ask, why do you need to save that many messages. Are you deleting any messages at all? You know those 2FA messages with the PIN numbers are only valid for 5-15 minutes, they can be deleted once you use it. There are other examples of things that don't really need to be saved too.

I don't use iMessage in iCloud, but I never have been able to stand more than 10-15 messages on my iPhone. Except for a few family, work, and church group messages, everything else stays for a couple of days and gets deleted! I can't stand all of that. I also clear my phone recents weekly.

Not necessarily. If you have the adequate storage to hold it, it should be fine, otherwise you’ll want to start deleting. I have 130,000!

I should do that, but that will be for another day!

I don't really use iCloud for iMessages, but aren't those simply text messages? And I recommend deleting those OTP/2FA messages you get from services once used.