Can confirm! I never even noticed until now that clicking the thumbnail takes you to the first post in the topic. Clicking the thumbnail is as snappy as it should be.
Thanks, will give that a try then, probably won’t get around to it tonight though. I also just found that Topic list thumbnails TC exists, I wonder if that would be a better fit for our use case due to its more limited scope. 
Thanks for your super fast responses, by the way!