How would you design a UX-friendly long (100+ event) timeline?

This is a tough cookie: a client has a large timeline of events, ~120 events spanning four years. Each event is either an external link or a blog-type document.

The goals are 1) easy-to-navigate UX (especially for mobile) with at least some sticky navigation, 2) ability to group / separate events by month, 3) light enough to load on slower 3G / 4G connections, and 4) content is easy to see without too many clicks.

The current workaround was just a long reverse chronological list of links, which is getting very unwieldy, egregiously long, and butting against Webflow’s CMS limits. It worked when there were 15 links, but it’s grown much larger.

Any libraries people love? Any ideas that you’ve liked to use?

Options so far:

  1. TimelineJS: TimelineJS looks like it would work but it’s got some pretty negative UX for mobile users (poor swiping responsiveness, impossible to zoom out, a heavy JS library). We use this on other parts of the site and it gets the most complaints (i.e, “It never loads. I’m swiping but it’s not moving.”).

  2. Swiper: I’ve used Swiper on some projects, but gosh, I cannot imagine 100+ slides, even on nested, thumbnail projects. Swiper also has painful UX for desktop users and has no

  3. Collapsible / expandable cards, perhaps by month? An example of what it could look like, but it’s not too inviting because all the content is hidden.

I’m ready to try ideas out of left-field, if they’re usable enough: I even considered (and quickly dismissed) Prezi does fit the bill in many ways, but it has an inordinate amount of bugs on mobile and the loading performance is quite painful.

Am I right that anything 1) performant and 2) with the fewest bugs will be something Webflow Native?