PHP variable not regenerating when publishing multiple posts at the same time

Context: I am building an automated system which will grab record from a database and immediately publish them en masse as a CPT. When they are being published, I have a function in the functions.php file of a child theme that should automatically set two categories to the post, a “fixed” one called ‘People’, and another one based on a column (categ) which is part of the record sent with the post.

Different number posts per page based on custom post type term id

Trying to cobble together a function from various suggestions that sets the number of posts per page based on the custom post type category in question. For instance, an “Alphabetical” category contains 3500+ posts, so I want pagination, but a child category “A” contains 100 posts and I want to show them all without pagination. The term_id for “A” is 1858, for “Alphabetical” is 1853. Can I check for specific term ids in a conditional? Not like this of course, which was just guessing…