[rafd]

The UI is based on side-scrolling, which works best with trackpad, but, I use a mouse and it works okay.

In practise, I tend to go through conversations 1-by-1 and either reply and close them, close them without reply, or star them and close them (for review later).

Re: whack-a-mole, you control which tags you're subscribed to and you can mute message threads you're not interested in, similar to how you can mute channels in Slack.