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If I use grots as a walking +5 cover save/meat shield how many should I bring in a footslogging army? one unit of 19 (1 runtherd)? two units? This is for any army size up to 2000 points. At what point am I wasting points on even one squad of these guys?

TBH, I think they would just be a waste of points altogether. With a lot of weapons that ignore Grots, they could just ignore the little guys, or just drop pipelates on both the grots and the boyz.

Theres 2 drawbacks to this.

Grots maybe cheap but to get enough to be an effective meatshield for more than a SAG will cost ~120 give or take. Thats still a substantial pointcost. Now if it was just double the wound count vs boyz of that point, it would be viable except...

1) Running RNG. If the grotz are to be effective they must stay ahead. If they roll a 1 when running, the boyz will either run past them or not run at all which can hurt you more than the meatshield would help at all.
2) Leadership. Grotz die in droves, even 33man squads (30+3 runtherders) rarely DONT have to pass a crappy leadership test if any guns point at them. They lack mob rule, so theyre Ld7 as long as a runtherder is alive. Rerollable Ld7 isnt that great, and the reroll makes more grotz go byebye (D3 worth).

Grotz are only suited for manning a quad gun or backfield objectives since 40pts for a scoring unit is flippin awesome. Anything else, i'd ignore them. Their size let them hide behind a lot of crap but as an army-wide meatshield they wont have that benefit....not to mention theyre so small any elevated shooters wont have their LOS blocked by them (remember, true line of sight. If he can see the entire model behind the grotz there is no intervening model save. Any hill, tower, etc will cause this)

If I had to pick a number of grots to own it would be 58-

This gives me options for

2x29
2x19 3x6 etc. (2 squads of grots 3 squads of big gunz)

The benefit of large blocks of grots is to tarpit enemy mobs or to protect a squad of boys from harder hitting units. If you charge grots and boys into a combat you can also limit the casualties on the boys (but might lose the combat because of grot wounds) if you perform the charge correctly.

The reason I say 29 grots in a squad is that you shave off 13 points by not having the last grot. This also lets you pull grots from the squad to free up points for other things if you need them.

From a testing point I would start out with 19 in a squad, and if they are shooting your grots they aren't killing your boys.

I picked up a box of Gnoblar from fantasy to give my grots more variety than just the ones that come for orks, just for a hey this was fun for me.