They scale just fine. Plus, they have no ongoing fuel or electricity costs.
Same for fluids too, give me less annoying predictable fluids instead of someones attempt at “realism”
Man, that was really bothering me on this run, too. 90% of the time, I can just avoid pumping fluids at all by always having the extractor and the destination at about the same level. But there was one spot where I needed to get water to the top of a factory building, and that was just a huge pain. I'd get it working, get it flowing ... and then it would randomly stop for no apparent reason? Even after making the pipeline more pumps than pipe, it still kept happening. I'd get back from doing something else to find that particular factory backed up and shut down because the water pumps had stopped working again. And only flushing the entire pipeline could get it to (eventually) work again, after waiting for the water to slowly make its way up from the extractor again.
Normally I don't bother at all with the fluid packaging/unpackaging tech, but in that instance, I was considering actually packaging the water and using a conveyor to get water containers to the top instead.
(In the end, adding a couple of fluid containers at the top seemed to fix the problem ... or at least delay the problem enough that I never ran into it again.)