Comment by scient

Large tables take hours, if not days. I attempted a test case on AWS using souped up io2 disks (the fastest most expensive disks they have) and a beast of a DB server (r5.12xl I think) and it became abundantly clear that at certain scale you won't be doing any kind of in-place table updates like that on the system. Especially if your allowed downtime is one hour maintenance window per week...