I've found the performance of labels with styles is similar to SVGs at least on a typical P&ID drawing. I haven't tried it on a massive process drawing yet. I suspect a single SVG for all pipes would be a little better performance but also less flexible.
One cool thing about doing it that way is you can add a border radius style in addition to the gradient style to make the pipes appear to connect. See the screenshot to see what it looks like.
Corners are kind of tricky but I use a separate style for each type of corner. It's an offset radial gradient. Color animations are just a style swap on a transform if needed.
You can even label the pipes because the pipes are labels and you can offset the labels if you want.
edit:
I forgot to mention, I typically put the pipes in a coordinate container to keep them together. This lets you hide the pipe layer if it's in the way and overlap labels to "connect" pipes.