This topic has too many variables to draw a concrete conclusion.
Your individual circumstances have to be built into your decision.
We ran 170 hives with both of us having full time jobs, went to 220 and i was full time bees while my partner kept her teaching job.
At 300 hives Karen quit easy teaching job and we were then full time bee keepers. We have peaked out at 360 hives.
We try to keep our bees about 80 miles from home in various locations depending on what is flowering. The winter 170 miles from home which we find is a time stretch due to driving time.
As you get more hives you tend to become more efficient in time you spend on each hive, some very good hives have a Spring inspection, brood, queen and frames. Then taking honey off when needed and a final inspection in Autumn before packing down for Winter. Would love to have 360 of these hives.
But others have queen quality, poor production, queenless etc that soak up more time, our quick fix is add a nuc, so they get new queen, brood and more bees. Need to make a decision that will not need you to come back in a few days to check what ever.
Our other advantage to our bee keeping business is that my partner is as good in a hive as i am, has a total working knowledge of bees and the honey business. At times if we are replacing queens we do a frame each looking for the queen to cull, speeds things up.
Our business is fully migratory with most hives doing 5-6 shifts per season.
We have tried 50 hives stationary for 7 months of the season, it is a lower work load of running bees.
As I am 69, my idea of retirement is 100 hives run stationary.
On the $ side we built our boxes from scratch, week nites after work and grew our hive numbers by splitting in spring. The increase is slow but as Jim said, start small and learn as you grow.
You will learn to modify you beekeeping as hive numbers grow.