1, do not use Bidir, it is not production ready, and will not give you any benefit in this kind of scene
2, Use CoronaMTL with self illumination for those things, like that light surface animated by distance, CoronaMTL, not CoronaLightMTL, and NOT CoronaLights
3, The example with Bidir/VCM you posted shows clearly, that there is absolutely no reason to have so many lights... You can super easily just paint this as a self illumination map.
4, This is not Corona related problem. This is workflow related problem. If you will keep making difficult scenes without thinking how to optimize them, every single renderer will fail at some point.