I am not saying that is nothing that should ever work, I am just saying that I was under the impression that is how it should work right now (also because I never saw it work differently since we introduced it). So if it should have worked differently, then somebody in the team should for sure have caught it before we released that feature.
Generally, we are a small team, and it is important that we focus and try to provide the most value. For that reason, we think about every feature deeply and about what is important and what we should invest time in. So often, things get descoped to provide the most amount of value, with the minimum amount of time/resources invested (80/20). So having endless scroll, and allowing access to all executions there, I would have imagined, could have been one of those things that got descoped in the first iteration of that feature.
To answer your question, which in my ears did not sound you asked in a very nice manner: “And what’s the benefit of having the new executions tab that only displays the last 20 entries”
Most users are mainly interested in the last few executions rather than in ones that happened a long time ago. Giving access to those in an easy fashion is so the most important thing as that is what 80% of the people want to get access fast (again 80/20).
Also agree with your point 100% that the experience of the current execution list is not great in any way, especially if there are a lot of executions (also there, I think, could for sure be communicated nicer). It is actually one of the few things which did not receive a major overhaul yet since the first version of n8n. For that reason, is that also something we are currently working on improving (you can see already a preview here). That also includes a date filter as far as I know which should get rid of the 10-minute scroll marathon.
On top, do we also start to work soon on a feature that allows adding kind of dynamic tags to executions. So you could, for example, add something like “userId=1234”. You can then, in the execution list, specifically filter for all executions for that specific user and so find the correct execution much faster.
and once you arrive at the execution, you press the folder icon to see it, and it loads the last execution
As mentioned above, it should actually display the correct execution, just the information in the top left corner is wrong, the execution and so the information on the nodes is correct. And that bug (that the information in the top-left corner is wrong) should have been fixed in version 0.208.1.