Limits of page reference fields in the admin

[DrQuincy]

From a database perspective page reference fields should scale quite well and there's always the option to build a custom table managed with hooks if you need something ultra fast so you have control of the indexes.

But, in the admin, is there any field type that scales well? I've tried them all out and from what I can see, all page reference field types and input types, do not have the option to show your page references in a searchable, paginated lit loaded by AJAX; they all go in a single list. I can imagine this getting problematic once the number of page references gets moderately big.

Is there such a thing? What do you do if you have 100s of references, 1000s of references or more? At what point are the standard page reference fields no longer an option?