Bloody hell, forgot to mute the thread and got tagged.
On the server where I play these days, 1818, I haven’t built my permanent base yet. I have a crappy little shack and I was in the process of farming for my castle, when I discovered Dome Keeper and started playing that more than Conan Exiles 
However, I can give you the numbers from my design spreadsheet for one of my favorite base designs. I’ve posted the screenshots of the very first version of that design long ago, so you can take a look at what the general concept is like.
The version 4 of that design – I don’t have screenshots of that, and I’ve let it decay when I left that server – used 13819 building pieces. This is the approximate footprint of that base:
And all it blocks from spawning are a few of the branches on the ground and maybe one or two dead trees.
Oh, and it didn’t affect the server performance. As for the client performance, I can’t speak for everyone’s hardware, but no one who visited or rode by ever complained about lag, either.
So yeah, it’s perfectly possible to build “big” without screwіng up.
As for the rest of the stuff, I’m too tired to keep trying. There’s no way to reason with people who keep looking for excuses to not get informed or understand the information they’ve been given. I’ll rectify my mistake and mute this thread.
Yep. And in the US, there’s the concept of “reckless driving”, too. People who ask for limits love to bring up speed limits as the real-life parallel of how “laws are always crystal clear”, but somehow fall silent when you show them the actual laws about reckless driving 