Recently, when beta-reading a wannabe novelist's debut novel, I commented that I thought she had too many characters, almost all of whom she names, many of whom have very little part to play in the story, and that I thought that she would do better to reduce the number and concentrate on making them stand out.
But there are some hugely popular novels with enormous casts. (Links refer to reviews in Dave's Book Blog)
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson has at least eleven narrative viewpoints: characters who narrate sections of the book from their point of view. I felt that very few of these characters were any more than superficial. Nevertheless, this book is a New York Times bestseller.
David Copperfield, a huge bestseller in its day and still regarded as a classic, thought by some to be the best novel Dickens wrote, has an enormous cast (as almost inevitable in what is fundamentally a fictionalised autobiography) though only a single narrator. I think Dickens manages to differentiate his characters by fixating on a grotesque physical characteristic or an eccentric behavioural trait (Uriah Heep, the villain, is sinuously serpentine while repeatedly claimiung to be 'umble'). But many people, I think rightly, claim that Dickens doesn't populate his novels with characters so much as caricatures.
The Madness of King George III is a perennially popular play by Alan Bennett but it also has a vast number of characters, one of whom (Fortnum) seems to be only present so a joke can be made about him. This large cast must cause problems when putting the play on stage and there seems to be no earthly reason why there should be so many virtually walk-on parts, except to create a greater spectacle. Certainly I, as an audience member, spent a significant amount of time trying, and often failing, to remember who was who.
So it seems that if you want to entertain, the more the merrier. Crowd scenes are fun. But I prefer novels that are driven by characters and therefore I say: the fewer the better.
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