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Programmable unitary photonic networks that interfere hundreds of modes are emerging as a key technology in energy-efficient sensing, machine learning, cryptography, and linear optical quantum computing applications. In this work, we establish a theoretical framework to quantify error tolerance and scalability in a more general class of "binary tree cascade'' programmable photonic networks that accept up to tens of thousands of discrete input modes $N$. To justify this scalability claim, we derive error tolerance and configuration time that scale with $\log_2 N$ for balanced trees versus $N$ in unbalanced trees, despite the same number of total components. Specifically, we use second-order perturbation theory to compute phase sensitivity in each waveguide of balanced and unbalanced networks, and we compute the statistics of the sensitivity given random input vectors. We also evaluate such networks after they self-correct, or self-configure, themselves for errors in the circuit due to fabrication error and environmental drift. Our findings have important implications for scaling photonic circuits to much larger circuit sizes; this scaling is particularly critical for applications such as principal component analysis and fast Fourier transforms, which are important algorithms for machine learning and signal processing.