I’m going off of my memory here, but I can count on my fingers the number of times that the deployment of a large change set has gone smoothly. And that absolutely includes high-level teams with a lot of know-how. There are just so many assumptions that need to be made and that need to be correct for that to happen.
If I compare that with delivering smaller changes, I find that the smaller change set is almost never problematic. Additionally, when a problem does occur, it can be rolled back very easily.