I was half expecting the conversation to derail into trying to convince the reporter that their approach is completely nuts and they should just paginate or do anything else. At least I would've felt some urge to do so.
Given the bug was reported 13 years ago and still isn’t resolved, that leads me to wonder what workaround they presumably did use
What exactly is nuts about the approach? Would you argue that we should have stuck to high RAM and low RAM because that was necessary on some computers, a long time ago? You can barely boot Firefox on anything less than a 1990 supercomputer, much less use gmail.
Its still pretty nuts today. You would never try to display million of records like that without some kind of pagination mechanism. Its not even a useful view to for humans to view that much data at that level of detail all at once.
There's at least one example on this thread so far of an actual web dev hitting this on a not-small website causing bugs for an actual user.
With a 30px record size, it's only ~600k records, which really doesn't seem that unreasonable to me
I think that is completely wrong, scrolling through thousands or even millions of records is vastly more usable than clicking through pages. Of course you do not load millions of records into RAM, just the ones that cross the view bounds.