Direct and network reciprocity are key mechanisms that promote cooperation in social dilemma games. Direct reciprocity focuses on exploring successful strategies in repeated interaction, while network reciprocity often simplifying players’ strategies to pure strategies or a limited set of classic strategies. Consequently, understanding the evolutionary dynamics of large-scale and diversity strategies in structured populations remains a challenge. Recent study reveals the cumulative reciprocity strategy’s extraordinary evolutionary advantages in well-mixed populations, but its performance in structured populations remains unclear. This study addresses this research gap by investigating the impact of the cumulative reciprocity strategy on the evolution of large-scale reactive strategy populations across different networks including lattice, small-world, and random networks. Through ecological evolutionary simulations, the results reveal that introducing cumulative reciprocity leads to noticeable changes in the evolutionary dynamics of populations employing reactive strategies. Cumulative reciprocity replaces the traditional generous tit-for-tat strategy as an evolutionarily dominant strategy, thereby fostering stable cooperation within the population. This conclusion holds true across various network densities, population size, mutation mechanisms, and network structures.