[bdzr]

Does anyone know why WP engine doesn't actually support multiple post revisions by default? I worked with WordPress significantly quite a while ago and found it to be an absolute dumpster fire of a codebase. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if running a scalable WP host required tamping down on some things.

[etchalon]

Revisions significantly bloat the size of the primary table (wp_posts) and secondary meta tables. Because WordPress's database architecture is hilariously simple and under-engineered, that bloat ends up slowing down every query.

So, to keep WordPress performant, you either need to regular prune wp_posts, or you need a continually beefier database instance to handle the installation.

Sane DevOps teams just limit revisions to something like "last 5" to keep things under control.