Large catalogs became a recurring problem across marketplaces, Shopify and WooCommerce: titles, descriptions, variants, attributes, taxonomy, metadata, feeds and search all had to remain usable at scale.
The unit of work changed
At small scale, the question is how to fix a product. At large scale, the useful question is how to correctly process the next ten thousand products without destroying good data.
That change affects everything: imports need safeguards, transformations need rules, existing values need to be preserved, partial progress needs to survive failures, and outputs need to be reviewable.
Search and discovery became infrastructure
Large catalogs also exposed the limits of default search and navigation. Work with Algolia and Meilisearch concepts grew from the need to make large product sets fast and discoverable rather than simply stored.
Catalog scale became the bridge between ecommerce operations and deeper software engineering because the business problem could no longer be solved reliably with manual administration.