Thanks for your input! To me it seems like Nemo only counts the direct descendants and doesn’t recurse, which makes it less useful for this purpose, but still nice to know!

Thank you for the idea! I didn’t know about the --inodes flag before, this seems like a viable solution for systems where I can’t / don’t want to install additional software!

Oh, wow, thank you! I had ncdu installed, but it was an older version, which didn’t yet have this feature. Now that I updated to the newest (Zig based 🎉) release this looks perfect for my needs!

Let me preface this by clarifying that I don’t claim to have the one and only right explanation that everyone should accept, I’d just like to point out that this theory also exists: https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/a/43799