vlfi VS commercial-emacs

That is essentially what VLF[1] does in Emacs. It reads in discrete chunks of the file at a time and doesn’t load the next one till you try to display it. Doesn’t require any fancy data structures, just some extra book keeping and mechanics.

[1] https://github.com/m00natic/vlfi

That is an issue both related to Emacs' internal representation of buffers and modes working in the background on the data in buffers of very large files, for which there are some workarounds like vlf-mode. See for example (info "(emacs) Long Lines") for similar issues with long lines and a solution more similar to what all those other editors you mention are doing to mitigate the issue of large files and large lines.

You can edit gigabyte-large files with no trouble vlf.el https://github.com/m00natic/vlfi – though it's a bit of a separate universe, you have to use vlf-occur instead of occur to find matches over all gigabytes of the file

;; To have it offered when opening large files:

For arbitrarily large files (think GB) in terms of size of the data stored you may use e.g. vlfi.

You can use vlf package to open large files

You know how "there's an app for that" used to be a thing? Well, there's an elisp package for that: https://github.com/m00natic/vlfi

Theres always: https://github.com/m00natic/vlfi

I’m aware of a few potential solutions including: dired-async and async-shell-command. There’s also https://github.com/m00natic/vlfi for viewing large files, but I don’t know how to address GPG pinentry and TRAMP issues very well.

I think you might enjoy this mode: vlfi. It is available in the standard Elpa package listing.

There is at least one Emacs fork on Github, but I don't see hordes of willing programmers flying towards it.

a link to a GitHub org and what appears to be a Star Trek quote is not really much to go on, so I might have overlooked something, but I assume you're referring to the tree-sitter.el file here?

FWIW, I have a couple of nnimap accounts with Gnus from commercial-emacs bd61a651d04d in GNU Emacs 0a8e88fd83db. I had to rule out syntax-ppss-invalidate-cache. Now doing gnus-group-get-new-news in a *Group* buffer doesn't lock (nor deadlock yet) Emacs for me.

https://shmelpa.commandlinesystems.com/ has a FAQ which explains the motivation.