Whenever you are comfortable with that.
You could brick your box. Unlikely, but there are so many different tv boxes out there that there is always a chance your box is somehow different than common ones. Since the boot environment starts from what is on emmc, if you screw up the emmc completely, your box is bricked. (You should still be able to recover by using amlogic tools to reinstall an android rom, but...)
No limit that I can think of.
You have that all correct.