[adanto6840]

Anecdote: In Unity, using DrawMeshInstancedIndirect, you can get >100k sprites _in motion_ and still maintain >100 FPS.

Using some slight shader/buffer trickery, and depending on what you're trying to do (as is always the case with games & rendering at this scale), you can easily get multiples of that -- and still stay >100FPS.

I agree, more of this approach is great. And I am totally flabbergasted at how abysmally poor the performance is with SpriteRenderer Unity's built-in sprite rendering technique.

That said, it's doable to get relatively high-performance with existing engines -- and the benefits they come with -- even if you can definitely, easily even, do better by "going direct".