Too many devices are "choking" the routers, disabling the wi-fi periodically.

I have two routers:

• NETGEAR Nighthawk AC1750 Smart Dual Band WiFi Router (R6700)
• NETGEAR AC1600 Dual Band Gigabit WiFi Router (R6260)

The first is connected to my modem. And the second router is connected to the first router.

The reason why I have two routers is because I have at least 44 wi-fi devices. When I had just the one router, at a certain point, it wouldn't allow additional wi-fi devices to connect. And it did this weird thing where it would begin disconnecting existing wi-fi devices. So I was trying to load balance between two routers which seemed to help for some time. But I'm in the same boat again.

The way I try to fix this is, I unplug all wi-fi devices, reboot the routers, then I need to slowly reconnect each device back because if I do it all at once it "chokes" again and doesn't restore wi-fi to all devices.

Does anyone have any advice on how I can stabilize my wi-fi? It's worse when there's a power surge that force reboots the modem/routers and I have to reset everything all over again.