It has been like that since the very beginning (sky engine).

That is absolutely not true. Elements with dirty layouts are tracked and layout is only recomputed up to the neearest layout boundary.

Weird, it looks like you're right but I recall their early marketing saying stuff like just rebuild the whole layout, it's cheap since it's compiled. They must have meant it's cheap to rebuild as needed haha

I'm looking at the code but I don't quite see that?

  auto start= result.indexOf("http://");
  ...
  auto end= result.indexOf("\r", start);
  ...
  m_describeUrl= result.sliced(start, end - start);

I don't think end can ever be < start (other than < 0 if not found, which is handled).

Because I'm dumb