At 11 pedals, I'm not sure if my chain counts as massive but it's not inconsiderable. I get a little bit of noise from time to time, but nothing that comes through over the sound my guitar or is otherwise noticable once the band is in full swing so I also tend to go for the. e) don't give a fuck school of thought.
I run about 25 pedals through two amps currently using livewires and some corex2 cables plus a bunch I built myself Run a few one spots a pedal power AC and some other wall warts for a few things that have strange power
No noise issues to speak of, I keep an MI Audio boost-n-buff way early in my chain
Also: and I didn't see this come up, in general my guitars are pretty quiet so they don't create much noise to amplify through a long chain
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I use 9 pedals (I know not so massive) but all of them are true bypass except for one, no tone loss to my ears, I also power it with a one spot, it is surprisingly quiet. Also GC, Livewire, and George L's patch cables. So, I dunno.
Start with a quiet sounding guitar... and by that I mean if your guitar hums and you're using a humbucker fix that first. If your guitar hums and you're using a single coil either think about changing the pickup (if the noise is too unbearable) or shielding your guitar better, or investing in a ground loop hum eliminator (Ebtech Hum X). If you've done all the above and you still have issues look into cables and faulty power supplies.
I'm currently running 16 pedals with a One Spot (about fourteen of them off the One Spot) and the rest are all wall warts. I get minimal noise when playing with the single coil and no noise when playing with the humbucker. Having said all that I'd love to get isolated power for each pedal and have each pedal in a loop but for now I'm happy. IMHO noise gates are just a bandaid and mess with guitar tone too much (I've only had experience using a Boss NS-2 for that though).