When I was using Thunderbird on Windows back years ago, i abandoned it in a week because it was absolutely slow when fed with years of archives as compared to Outlook 2010. Seeing recs for Thunderbird recently says something for sure.
https://github.com/thunderbird/developer-docs/blob/master/th... and https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/the-future-of-thunderbi...
I've never had problems with Thunderbird on that front, but then again, I've never had email accounts with 100k emails archived.
If you want mail to just work and updates going smoothly it's the solution.