A crafting station with 10,000 queued items generates less ‘lag’ than 10 crafting stations with 10 items queued.

Correct.

Its why I’ve advocated for specialized stations that can only store one type of material to lose inventory slots entirely, and replace them with just a number of the material. So stone storage that can hold say 100,000 stone wouldn’t have 100 slots, it would just be a single variable that stops letting you put stone in at 100,000. Effectively turning that station into a single stack, but it would actually take less server resources than that.

But to put it simply the issue is the number of slots, not the number in the slots.