Row ID preloading is an extremely effective technique—and not just for SQLite. I’ve also used it to great effect on massive Aurora MySQL or Postgres clusters since I could send the SELECT to a replica, and the whole point of deletions was that index memory pressure from the row filtering was putting tons of CPU and buffer cache pressure on the db.

If you’re in a situation where partition pruning or other strategies for getting useless data out of the hot path don’t make sense, this is a killer strategy.