How to debug large I2C bus?
The technique for testing will depend upon whether this is new first article design being debugged for the first time or if it is one board of a known working design that is acting up. 

For purposes here I'll assume this is the first case where you've just made this board and are now trying to get it to work. 

One technique is to use a sharp cutter like an xacto knife to cut the bus traces at some point in the connection chain. This is a quick way to isolate if the problem is presented by a certain group of the chips or not. After the problem is debugged you can scrape off the solder mask on the cut traces and solder it back together with a short piece of fine wire. This technique is faster than removing individual components and approximates an binary search to the problem if multiple cuts end up needing to be made.

Note that if using the cut trace idea you may need to temporarily patch in a pull-up resistor for the I2C bus if the onboard pullup is on the cut away side of the bus. 

Another technique is to use an oscilloscope to look at what the signal looks like when it is being driven by one component or another. For example if the MCU is trying to drive the SCL line you may be able to see some wiggle to the signal. That can lead to giving clues to what may be wrong. For example if it can pull down from 3.3V to 1.2V but no lower the problem could be a too low of pullup resistor value or a short of the SCL line to some other net that wants to be at a high level.