> As a consumer of Atom feeds I find whole content feeds like that quite convenient, provided they don't get into the thousands of entries.

Atom does have an RFC for supporting pagination so it is possible (client support provided) to have both a short feed as well as full content history: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005#section-3

For Wordpress sites, `?paged=X` can be used to paginate through RSS feeds, although that's more of a Wordpress standard than an RSS/Atom standard: https://codex.wordpress.org/Pagination

My personal gripe is that clients checking for query params would seem to rule out pagination of static feeds (so you'd end up shipping a single huge response to the client) but now that I look closer, I guess you could achieve it via Atom, you'd just end up having to reshuffle every feed whenever pages get updated.

I went through some of this recently when standing up some home software to generate RSS feeds for sites that don't have them :)