That works until you have (like the example) 20k titles. That's a performance hit to the (assuming) database to send all of that data at once, to the web server

That works until you have (like the example) 20k titles. That's a performance hit to the (assuming) database to send all of that data at once, to the web server for having to parse all of those results and generate the HTML, to the client browser for having to parse all of that HTML and render it. It's possible, of course, that it's better for the user. It just doesn't happen to be that way very often, from my own anecdotal experience.