Renaming files and folders

I’m reorganizing my digital life, which is basically one big synced folder. So every subfolder moved/renamed is pretty much a couple dozen gigabytes. I noticed some changes are applied very fast, and some seem to reupload everything. I can’t figure out what causes the behavior, and I would like to read in detail how this works.

Somewhere else I read that pausing the folder before doing maintenance has a better chance of picking up moves. Is this true?

I’m doing this maintenance in bash/linux. For some actions it’s a lot faster than the OS GUI.

I’m not sure if this or the other one is the relevant thread but this one has the latest reply.