I tried this with a regular expression replacement. It correctly showed the pages to be changed, but then just froze (I needed to hit control-C). Running runJobs.php didn't have any effect. No pages were changed.
It may have been a problem with my regex. I ended up using the web interface and just using normal text replacement. So unfortunately I can't assist much further (though happy to try things out that won't break my wiki). It may be worth looking into how replaceAll.php operates in this sort of case though. Thanks. Jonathan3 (talk) 17:24, 23 February 2020 (UTC)