Cross-references are by their very nature linked with long documents. Adobe claims InDesign has "…powerful features for creating longer documents" but, as long as the cross-references feature remains so painfully slow, that statement does not stand up to scrutiny.

Just opening a cross-reference in a long document (2,000 pages) is taking four hours on a Mac Studio with 64 GB memory. How long it takes to actually edit it is, as yet, unknown – I gave up after 90 minutes watching the spinning beachball of death to work on another project.

As it stands, the cross-references feature is bordering on unusable. Pure and simply, it is not fit for purpose and needs to be rewritten from the ground up.