I still think you're ikely to hit a performance bottleneck issue with those kinds of uses, though.
As WASas mentioned in OP, there seems to be a more fundamental performance problem with how the shader is built, and that's limiting it from anything beyond fairly basic uses. When you look at similar shader/texture bomber/array/replicator-type entities in other systems, they don't appear to incur anywhere near as much overhead, so it seems like there's significant room for improvement inside Shader Array w.r.t. performance (or possibly requires re-implement closer to how alternatives do it).