Hex meshes have much less elements but can be applied only to rather simple shapes.
You can definitely start by making the mesh coarse enough to handle it in reasonable time, look for stress concentrations and refine locally where needed. Such a large refinement of the whole mesh is rarely needed, you should be able to keep larger element size away from the regions of interest. Then you could even use the submodeling technique to focus on a small and highly refined piece of the model but let’s leave that for later.