As far as I know, 1 Lag needs 2 NIC at least. This means that for 8 Lag's your hardware has 16 Nic's Maybe I am wrong on this but LAG feature is to convert Nic's as switch ports
Yeah it may seem quiet a few but we have 20 ports across 5 NICs in the box. It's a requirement for us not to use VLANs so we have to use separate networks for different security zones.