I’ve been mucking about with this in my fork, and have found the same thing. It works, but loses both the unread message indicator and the link highlighting on the sidebar. Both those things are indeed high value!
I’ve done a PR for where I got up to:
But to really fly, it really needs the unread indicator and the link highlighting to work, eh?
Point well made! That is a much better idea. To my shame, I’m actually one of the authors of that TC!