You are absolutely correct. 90-95% of the users are muted and their producers are correspondingly paused on the server. We just want to ensure that at any time, someone can quickly unmute themselves and speak up if necessary. I am guessing this fact, along with being audio only, is why we achieved such a high consumer count.
I see now that you are right. For some reason my initial math was making think of this in the wrong way.
Router 1 (on Worker1) has 50 connected users. So initially 50 * 49 = 2450 consumers.
Router 2 (on Worker2) has 50 connected users. 50 * 49 = 2450 consumers.
Pipe 50 producers from Router 2 to Router 1 creates another 50 * 50 = 2500 consumers on Router 1.
Pipe 50 producers from Router 1 to Router 2 creates 50 * 50 = 2500 consumers on Router 2.
So we still reach the same 9900 consumers, but each router only has 4950.
Fantastic… this is definitely something we should be able to achieve and I am glad you straightened out my thinking on this!
Thanks so much