Ah, that makes sense. I should be able to reproduce this - I didn't test these distances (but it did occur to me there might be some limit).
I'm probably going to change the beams so they only extend like 10-20 units from the source and target. But I'll report this as a Factorio bug also; save game corruption really shouldn't happen!
Also it means orbital transmitters should always be fine, as they extend exactly 100 units vertically.
Thank you for the detail and for discovering the cause!