Umm, if I may--sensitivity is one thing; overload limit is another. The relationship between them is a matter of the circuit design. A preamp or recorder can offer high sensitivity without necessarily being easy to overload.
Does anyone here remember the Advent 201 cassette recorder by any chance? It had a large record level knob which controlled both channels at once, plus smaller ones for the left and right channels individually. It wasn't perfect, since the large knob was a dual potentiometer and the tracking between channels could vary by a dB or more as you turned the knob up or down (especially down). And the source impedance "seen" by the next amplifier stage in the circuit would vary according to the user's settings, which requires a high input impedance for that next stage, and a purely resistive impedance at that, or else the level control would also be a tone control (a problem which some otherwise very nice Rane preamps have had). That requires some extra homework on the part of the circuit designer.
But the neat thing about the main control was that it was right at the inputs; the center pin of the deck's RCA sockets was connected to the top of that control, with some RF protection as I recall, but no transistors or ICs in between. (Actually, back then ICs weren't a thing yet in consumer audio equipment.) So you could feed in any signal levels that you had available--50 Volts peak-to-peak, even--and the input circuit would never overload once your levels were set, because that level control functioned as a continuously variable pad that could be set as high as you would ever need.
I'm not saying that other manufacturers should all adopt that design. The Advent 201 was unusual in that it had aux inputs but no microphone inputs. For live recording, Advent sold a little outboard preamp that had transformer-balanced inputs and was powered by a +18 VDC socket on the side of the recorder. They figured that most people would use the decks in their home hi-fi systems, so those people shouldn't have to pay for microphone input circuitry--nor should the designers of the deck be forced to minimize the cost of that circuitry as tightly as they would have to do for a feature that wasn't a selling point for most potential customers, who only wanted a cassette deck so that they could copy LPs or FM broadcasts. I'd be surprised if as many as 10% of the people who bought Advent 201s also bought MPR-1s (the little outboard preamps).
But the point is that "sensitivity" = the minimum input voltage that can drive the recorder to 0 dB levels, while the overload ceiling can be rather independent of that parameter. Plenty of good recorders and preamps have high input sensitivity but also higher overload thresholds than this Marantz recorder seems to have. -- A third (mostly) independent parameter is the noise floor of a recorder or preamp; that isn't directly a function of its sensitivity, either.
In summary, it's fair to look for equipment with a low noise floor, enough sensitivity for your typical applications plus a little extra for special applications, AND a high enough overload ceiling to let us record without messy pads and belts (didn't the old Tampax ads teach us anything)? Also, the internal pad(s) on a recorder or preamp shouldn't require stopping a recording or diving into a menu to set them. When you need them, you generally need them right away.
As a less antique example than the Advent cassette deck, I know that I can connect any Schoeps microphone to my Grace Lunatec V3 preamp; its inputs can handle the maximum voltage that those microphones can put out. Period. And at any given setting of the gain control knob, the preamp can deliver output levels all the way up to 0 dBFS on the meters. Period again. So all I have to do is set levels so that I don't quite reach 0 dBFS on the meters, and that guarantees that the preamp won't overload--neither at its input, its output, or anywhere in between. It will also contribute only a minimum level of noise--generally less than the inherent noise of the microphones, let alone the venue, at any normal or near-normal gain setting.
So it's perfectly possible to meet all three requirements at the same time. But the designers have to understand that simply adding balanced XLR inputs and phantom powering don't make a piece of equipment "professional" unless it is also capable of handling the signal levels that professional microphones put out.