Have you benchmarked the replication? Or do you know of anyone who's running it against a primary with a couple 10s of thousands of writes per second?
Not sure how GC works in Golang but if you see 20k writes/s sustained that's what I'd be nervous about. If every write is 4 kB I think it would be something like a quarter of a TB per hour, probably a full TB at edge due to HTTP overhead, so, yeah, a lot to handle on a single node.
Maybe there are performance tricks I don't know about that makes 20k sustained a breeze, I just know that I had to spend time tuning RAM usage and whatnot for peaks quite a bit earlier and already at that load planned for sharding the traffic.