Constantly Pinging Search Engines Every Second

According to https://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/help/#update-notification, it’s supposed to only ping when a new post is published or updated.

However, I just discovered that it’s actually been pinging non-stop, every second.

1. Is this even necessary/useful if you’ve already added your sitemap to Search Console?

2. Nothing bad has happened yet (and I’ve been a user for years), but my gut instinct is that this isn’t ideal, both in terms of server resources, and in that Google might consider it abuse to be pinging their server incessantly, and could blacklist my IP.

3. I also just noticed that the pings aren’t encrypted (http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping). Can you update http to https please?

Thanks