I think the staying together property is the important aspect. Light diminishes by 4 times every time you double the distance. Except not really because its just that it disperses at that rate by virtue of spheres. Light itself on an individual scale is as far as I know, infinite. So if you convince them to stay in parallel formation, you can transfer them in a vacuum infinitely.

Lasers don't perfectly align the photons but they do a pretty darn good job. Like take a flashlight and shine it at a wall and step back and the light in the wall keeps getting bigger and bigger. Now I have not verified this next part and I am vaguely remembering what someone else said on reddit so the size probably is a bit different than what I'll say but for the distances its kind of moot. But the lazer on space probes only goes from the base lazer size to about the size of a car going from pluto to earth. So they are shining a little light at earth and it only splits a very small amount. They also mentioned there are designs for perfectly straight lasers but to go from like 99.998% to 99.999% is obnoxiously difficult considering pretty much nothing requires that level and the biggest obnoxious part is it requires a larger and larger lens, eventually reaching infinite size in order to make the perfectly straight lazer. Again, any specifics, take them as a general idea and not a point you want to bring up in casual conversation without adding "I heard it was something along these lines" because this is all "something along these lines" after the point I mentioned that I was parroting off someone from reddit. The points before that I know with much greater confidence.