I've worked with large MySQL databases that used row-based replication and things like an UPDATE or DELETE that affected millions of rows had to be applied in batches there, because otherwise one SQL query might result in a million updated rows needing to be sent to all of the replicas at once.

Yeah, I think anyone that's done significant database work has come to the understanding that large updates need to be done in batches, otherwise you nuke performance.

Once you get to about 1M rows of data, batching is essential.