Neither log shipping (copying WAL files one by one) nor streaming replication (sending a stream of WAL) works by sending queries. WAL segments are 16MB by default, and the default archive_timeout is 0, not 1 minute (and the archive timeout is not applicable to streaming replication anyway). There is also nothing "adaptive" about the replication—when there is no traffic, there will be ~no changes, and when there are changes, they will be sent to the replica.
I don't understand what the comment is suggesting used to happen in periods of no activity that made replication unusable, but it is also probably incorrect, and has nothing to do with the write amplification problem.
What's important is that the WAL was generated on a periodic basis and of a constant size. Say 16MB every minute. It's pretty much a plain file, that could be stored on S3/FTP.
This had a lot of drawbacks:
- Replicas were measurably late behind the current state, simply because of the built-in delay in "replication".
- It was incredibly inefficient on bandwidth and storage. Consider the time it takes to transfer large files (especially for off-site replicas) and storage costs. That further contributed to poor performance and delay.
- There could be many WAL files generated at once when there were changes happening. They would take FOREVER to be processed. It was commonplace for replicas to fall 5-10 minutes under what I consider to be minimum activity.
Long story short, the replication was reworked in a later version of PostgreSQL (3 or 4 years ago), the part about fixed size and fixed delay is not true anymore.
In more recent versions there's "logical replication", which sort of "sends the queries", in that the secondary node has its own database state that does not have to be exactly identical with the primary, allowing for replication across major versions.
In my opinion though, unless you really need logical replication for some reason, stick with streaming replication. It's much easier to understand and there are fewer failure modes.
What it sends is not the queries, but a logical description of the changes to each row that were made by running the query. So an UPDATE that changes N rows would generate N changes to be applied to the corresponding rows (usually identified by primary key) on the logical replica, not a single update that had to be "re-executed".