I only figured out what was happening by trial and error while trying to fix the production issue where I was moving 1000 messages at a time into a 2nd queue. O

I only figured out what was happening by trial and error while trying to fix the production issue where I was moving 1000 messages at a time into a 2nd queue. Once I had dequeued 20k, everything starting pumping like normal. That's when I fired off an email to our AWS rep asking for confirmation from the SQS dev team. Within a couple weeks, the docs you just quoted were added.