I was typing out a command and instinctively pressed tab to see a file list. The directory contains 15k+ files

At least you were on a local disk and NOT on SAN (or even worse -- NAS, like CIFS of NFS). That would most likely rule your system unusable :) These D processes would both boost your System Load to the sky and make the nfs daemon unresponsive :D

For me, with large dirs, it asks if I'm sure I want to display all files 😄

@linuxxx work with node a lot? Lol

@ScribeOfGoD

Just press tab in your home dir. It wants to list all the binaries in your $Path. Bash/fish/zsh (heck I don't know any shell that doesn't) will ask if you are sure if that you want to list all of them.