When does DaVinci Resolve's Object Removal actually work vs. when to give up

Object Removal in Resolve Studio gets recommended a lot, but the cases where it genuinely works are narrower than most tutorials suggest.

The tool works by finding clean background in other frames and using it to fill the masked area. That means if a large subject covers unique background detail for the entire shot, there's nothing authentic to recover. The analysis has no real information to borrow. At that point you're looking at a separate clean plate, another take, rotoscoping in Fusion, or just cropping.

The blurry-patch problem is similar: if the effect is pulling from a frame with different focus, motion blur, or lighting, the fill will look wrong even when the geometry is fine. Shortening the analysis range and improving the matte often helps more than just re-running Scene Analysis.

For privacy work specifically, a tracked blur or mosaic is usually faster and more defensible than asking the tool to invent plausible background.

What kinds of shots have actually given you clean results, and where have you hit the wall?