Hey yes so we have ~10K news nodes under the same parent on psmb.ru.
We hide them from the tree. To navigate them, editors use all the same ways the website visitors have: list, search, tags etc.
If I had to add additional ways to navigate that data for editors only, I would just add that as an extra UI element that is rendered only in BE (i.e. in the same way as we did CreateNodeButton). But I would think twice: if editors needed it, maybe website visitors would benefit from those extra navigation options too, perhaps as a optional UI/
To create news nodes we use this: https://github.com/psmb/Psmb.CreateNodeButton
P.S.: here’s the whole source code of our website https://github.com/psmb/PsmbDistr