From an engineering standpoint, I get it.
But from a normal user's standpoint? I don't care. If my email client needs more than a single thread, something's fucked.
I randomly bounce between Thunderbird and KMail and honestly I can't tell the difference except cosmetically. Both are snappy. Neither crash. Both send and receive emails just fine.
I know parent is probably talking about a different type of threading, but Thunderbird's lack of process threading means the UI just gets stuck when it's syncing a large numbers of emails, which can happen if your subscribed to a lot of mailing lists, etc.
Threading as in grouping together all replies to an email. This is still somewhat buggy on Thunderbird in 2026.