Have not found the crawl rates changed for sites where everything is well linked together. Then again, these have been just small sites with a few million pages.
crawling != indexing
with a segmented sitemap (i.e.: one per pagetype, per namespace, ..) you get important communicated to indexed ratios you otherwise do not get.
if crawling and indexing works, it works but if it doesn't you should know it (see it in google search console) and debug it (narrow it down via segmented sitemaps).