I think I have a solution, and I'll tell you why I think it worked. Maybe someone here that is more savvy with *nix systems can see if I'm right.
I tried uninstalling almost everything from my system that wasn't "stock" -- Arq, ClamXAV, Citrix, Dropbox, almost everything that had a kext, loaded at start-up, or seemed to get into the guts of my computer.
Nothing. No matter what I uninstalled, it seemed that cron spawning happened over and over.
I reinstalled Catalina. Again, the endless cycle of spawning happened.
I figured I was thinking about things the wrong way, so I changed my approach and started thinking about cron in general.
So, "cron" has been deprecated in MacOS, wherein "launchd" really handles those type of regularly occurring tasks. Nobody needs to run a cron job under Darwin. Really, it shouldn't have to be running on any Mac.
Also, if you look in Activity Monitor, you'll perhaps see that ALL those cron jobs were spawned by a single cron job...which in turn, has the parent process of launchd. At least it was for me.
After digging a little, I uncovered an interesting fact -- launchd will spawn a cron job if it finds anything in /usr/lib/cron/tabs. Thinking about this, I rebooted my mac into a fresh Guest account, and looked through Activity Monitor. Guess what? NO cron jobs running, at all.
So, something was installed in my Mac (and perhaps yours, too) that makes a call to an out-of-date process, and is probably old or badly coded. After thinking about it, I was left with two choices: I could erase the entire drive, do a fresh install of MacOS and reload my programs and files, or...
I could eliminate whatever offender was likely hiding in /usr/lib/cron/tabs.
I looked through the directory as best as I could, but I couldn't really decipher the culprit.
After careful consideration, making a backup, and understanding that I may hose my system and require a fresh wipe and reinstall, I nuked the entire /usr/lib/cron/tabs directory.
And... it worked. No problems since then. Been several days now. I turned Spotlight back on, readded pretty much everything I had been running before Catalina, and no blips or errors at all.
I'm not suggesting that my answer is the completely correct one, but it seems to have worked for me.
I'd be interested to hear what anyone else has to add or say to this saga, since I'm in healthcare, and not a computer guru. I'd be pleased to be more thoroughly educated, and if I did something wrong, I'd love to know that too.
