I imagine/hope a lot of the heavily engineered ops teams don’t use zone transfers, instead using APIs. The idea of primary and secondary wouldn’t really a strong indicator at that scale.
Then I'm stuck with a bunch of bad questions about how often to poll, and whether CF's rate limits would support any reasonably quick poll interval.
(The big problem is that we have other tooling that relies on being able to update DNS, the big one being ACME for certificate renewal. The changes it makes to CF would need to be rapidly replicated out to the nameserver.)
(Nothing in the post really strikes me as particular to CF, either. I think I could easily replace everything I've said here with "Route 53" and end up in the same bucket, maybe plus or minus zone xfers working.)