LostArk Discourse forum shows 2.4 thousand weekly 10.8 thousand monthly numbers of topics.
Topic browsing can be used like this:
Users will occasionally use the search control like forum “historians”. 99% non historians won’t check more than a few pages of topics using the slider. So at LostArk and other very busy forums almost everybody won’t check topics older than a few days of news. But then very few Discourse forums are as big as LostArk. Non paginated forums always have right lower page numbers to allow really easy chunks of topics to review but still they most won’t check to say 200 topics.
Without a topic slider like the reply slider has, its like not being able to browse forum topics - like not being able to browse books walking easily down the corridors in “real” libraries - with or without categories! So for forums that have many important (to their users) topics there would have major benefit.