Having also supported hundreds of production MySQL databases, statement based replication is absolutely inferior. But it should also be noted that row based replication (similar to streaming replication in that the actual data changes are synced) has been supported in MySQL since v5.1.5 (current is v5.7). And row based replication is the default since v5.7.7 https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/replication-formats....