I don’t want to deter you from applying whatever logic fits best and I don’t want to take over this thread.
Just sharing my experience.
8k, 15k, 25k notes – doesn’t seem to matter. What matters is what you have onboard, CSS, plugins, etc.
For example, I have fresh experience of merging my vault onto this newly advertised demo vault and while I kept trimming the original functionality – plugins used, exchanging some bulky CSS snippets with my own but keeping some of those I had no replacements for – I never got close to what I had before in terms of snappiness so in the end I just took some of the goodies I found in that vault and incorporated them in my original vault.
So ultimately, large vaults are not a problem, what matters is how your device can handle hoarding ill-fitting pieces (which will not cause real problems until you have large quantities of files and links: a large metadatacache).
And again, let me stress here this is not a one-on-one conversation here. Everywhere on Reddit or on this forum people will maintain Obsidian can handle large vaults. The problem is themes and CSS.
You have a problem if:
- tab opening and closing are slow
- scrolling in larger documents breaks up (not smooth)
- Backlinks and Search Modal results are slow coming in with progress bar not flowing naturally