Does the statement "never more than one arbiter" ALWAYS apply?

[Stennie_X (Stennie)]

Welcome to the community @Nathan_Neulinger!

There is currently (as at MongoDB 4.4) no hard restriction on adding multiple arbiters, but my general advice would be “at most one arbiter, ideally none”.

For more elaboration on why, please see my comment on Replica set with 3 DB Nodes and 1 Arbiter - #8 by Stennie_X.

@Nathan_Neulinger

The reason I ask is it seems like having the extra two arbiters would allow a split where PS / SAA would allow SAA to stay operational as primary in a case where P,S,S,A,A were instances in a larger pool of machines where you might potentially lose more than one of them at a time.

The voting majority situation you are setting up with PS/SAA would be better implemented as P/SS (or ideally P/S/S with members in three data centres).

In your PSSAA scenario, unavailability of any data-bearing node also means you lose the ability to acknowledge majority writes despite maintaining a voting majority. This generally has undesirable operational consequences, particularly in modern versions of MongoDB with more features and use cases relying on majority read and write concerns.

Regards,
Stennie