The purpose of global approvers was exactly things like this. If you want to do a mechanical change to an insanely huge number of files, they can potentially approve it.
In my experience, global approvers were used extremely rarely, only in cases like this where the transformation was purely mechanical and it was possible to verify that there were no logic changes.
Most of the time rather than global approvers, you were encouraged to use a system that would automatically split your change into a bunch of smaller CLs (PRs), automatically send those to owners of each module, then automatically merge the changes if approved. It would even nag owners daily to please review. If you had trouble getting approval for some files you could escalate to owners of a parent directory, but it'd rarely be necessary to go all the way up to global approvers.
Basically if there was even the slightest chance that your change could break something, it's always safer to ask individual code owners to approve the change.
The purpose of global approvers was exactly things like this. If you want to do a mechanical change to an insanely huge number of files, they can potentially approve it.
In my experience, global approvers were used extremely rarely, only in cases like this where the transformation was purely mechanical and it was possible to verify that there were no logic changes.
Most of the time rather than global approvers, you were encouraged to use a system that would automatically split your change into a bunch of smaller CLs (PRs), automatically send those to owners of each module, then automatically merge the changes if approved. It would even nag owners daily to please review. If you had trouble getting approval for some files you could escalate to owners of a parent directory, but it'd rarely be necessary to go all the way up to global approvers.
Basically if there was even the slightest chance that your change could break something, it's always safer to ask individual code owners to approve the change.