It's been this way for years. It's trivial to use the site search to pull up threads that have hundreds of comments. This doesn't prove whether those comments

It's been this way for years. It's trivial to use the site search to pull up threads that have hundreds of comments. This doesn't prove whether those comments were spilling over back then, or whether you're seeing pagination being retroactively applied, but IIRC, this has been going on since at least as far back as 2013.