The register history screen stops counting what it never shows
The console screen for a single register shows every published version of every prompt file that register is composed from, newest first. It only ever shows the newest stretch of each file’s history — there is no pager on that screen, and there never was.
It was asking for more than that. The reading it used is the one built for a paged screen, which also works out how many versions there are in total so a pager can say “page 3 of 9”. The register screen threw that total away the moment it arrived, and it was paying for one of these counts per composed file, every time the screen opened. Published versions are never deleted, so the count was getting slower with every publish while the answer stayed unused.
The screen now asks only for what it displays. Nothing on it changes: the same publishes appear in the same order, the live version is marked the same way, and the diffs between publishes work as before. The paged history on an individual prompt file’s own screen is untouched — that one has a pager, so it still needs the total, and it still gets it.