You are standing in front of a six-foot panel with five clamps and a doubt. Is that enough? Should you go find more? Is the joint going to come out starved because you crowded it, or weak because you didn't?
The advice you've heard is "use enough clamps." That isn't a number. A number is what you actually need.
There is one. Two, really, because a glue-up has to satisfy two separate things at once, and almost nobody knows they're separate.
The first is pressure. A glue line wants somewhere between 100 and 250 psi across the joint while it cures. Pine is happy near the bottom of that. Hard maple and white oak want the top. A parallel clamp at normal hand pressure puts down around 1,000 pounds of force, so for a typical edge joint the math closes fast. You are not short on force.
The second is spacing. The pressure from a clamp doesn't go straight down in a line. It spreads out through the thickness of the wood at roughly 45 degrees, like a cone. For the glue line to see even pressure the whole way along, the cones from neighboring clamps have to overlap where the joint is. On ¾-inch stock that means a clamp every 6 to 8 inches. This has nothing to do with force. It's geometry.
Here's the part worth keeping: a clamp every 6 to 8 inches at normal hand pressure satisfies both constraints for most hardwood furniture. That's the answer the vague advice was pointing at the whole time.
Now the fear. Can you starve the joint by piling on clamps? On a well-fit hardwood joint with PVA glue and hand pressure, no. You can't. A starved joint is real, but it comes from somewhere else: too-thin glue under too much force on dense wood, or glue soaking away into end grain. Not from one extra clamp on a joint that fit well to begin with. You can stop counting and stop worrying about that one.
The thing that actually goes wrong lives at the other end. A bare clamp jaw landing on a narrow edge concentrates all that force on a small strip of wood. Cherry crushes around 690 psi across the grain. Pine gives at about 380. A bar-clamp jaw can clear those numbers and leave a dent in your stock that you don't see until the clamp comes off. That is the real reason for cauls. Not "even pressure" as a slogan. A dented edge is worse than a slightly under-clamped joint, and a strip of scrap under the jaw prevents it.
So: a clamp every 6 to 8 inches on ¾-inch stock. Cauls on any narrow edge a bare jaw could bite. Done. The question was never as complicated as the worrying made it.