What is the main risk of choreography sagas as the number of participating services grows, and how would you recognize you've hit it?

As a choreography saga's step count grows past roughly four or five services, the overall plan stops being traceable from any single place — understanding the full flow requires manually opening every participating service and tracing which listeners react to which events, since no code artifact describes the sequence directly. You've likely hit this point when a simple question like 'what happens, in order, when this business event occurs?' takes real investigative effort across multiple codebases to answer, or when onboarding a new engineer to the flow requires a verbal walkthrough rather than pointing them at one file. A related symptom is debugging incidents becoming slow specifically because tracing a failure back to its root cause means hopping between several unrelated services' listener classes. When this happens consistently, it's usually a sign to migrate that specific process to an explicit orchestrator, which centralizes the plan and its failure handling into one readable component.