So it looks like I may have found a replacement for Adobe Bridge.
It's called XnView.
It's available for both Mac and Windows, but frankly if you're on Windows you should be using ThumbsPlus.
It's been a little bit of a learning curve, but XnView's functionality is very similar to that of Bridge—but the difference is this application actually works. Thumbnails (with name, size, and create date displayed below each one, a requirement for me) generate near-instantaneously no matter how many files are in a folder.
I remember trying XnView several years ago, but like all the others I'd auditioned, it seemed there was always one thing that didn't work the way I needed it to. With XnView, it was drag-and-drop. You couldn't drag files from one folder to another. Seriously?
Well that's been fixed in this latest version.
The interface took a lot of tweaking to get it looking the way I wanted (and to be honest it's still not 100% there, but I can work with it), but so far my only gripe has been that there doesn't seem to be any way of increasing the size of the font in the folders pane. I can live with that; the mere fact that I don't have to wait hours for thumbnails to generate before I can do anything with the files has me sold.
And the icing on this cake? It's free (although you're more than welcome to make a donation, which I did).
– July 7th – Adobe software clearly not optimised for M1 chip, pressure is rising,
– July 16th – Nekkid menz' library: unmanageable,
Grumpf! (Mark's short way to express "There has to be a solution out there and I'm gonna find it!"),
– July 17th – "Eurêka!"
Me: "Congrats! Fine example of resilience :-)"