Please refrain from massively replacing long release event country lists with worldwide release event for now because it slowdowns search indexing even more than adding multiple release countries initially did.
Additionally it doesn’t seem that any decision has been made about it. Would it be the case, removal edits should preferably be entered by a bot so that this huge task can be done and at a controlled rate.
In the longer term, there are plans to make indexed search not impaired by removing long country lists thanks to the dbmirror2 replication for which the foundations have been delivered in May 2022.
P.S. This post is solely from the technical perspective of indexed search. I will read the posts of this thread further to reply later on about the other above mentioned issues.