Comment by ants_a

There is no backpressure from replication and streaming replication is asynchronous by default. Replicas can ask the primary to hold back garbage collection (off by default), which will eventually cause a slow down, but not blocking. Lagging replicas can also ask the primary to hold onto WAL needed to catch up (again, off by default), which will eventually cause disk to fill up, which I guess is blocking if you squint hard enough. Both will take considerable amount of time and are easily averted by monitoring and kicking out unhealthy replicas.