I don’t understand this limitation?? It’s also super annoying to only find out about it if I click ‘limit items’ and to not have it displayed on the nested collection list in the default state – I’ve just spent the last few hours building a nested collection list layout, then been frustratedly trying to figure out why half the items in one list weren’t showing and only found this out by chance when I clicked limit items. And now I’m going back to the drawing board on how to structure these lists. Honestly, if you’re going to limit things to 5 items, why even give people the ability to use that data structure at all?!
I can’t speak for Webflow, but the reason for collection list limits and nested item limits is likely performance and page-delivery costs. 100 items x 5 nested = 500 items that have to be delivered into the page dynamically and that can equal a ton of HTML.
That said, a lot of people have use cases where this limitation just doesn’t work, and that’s why there are solutions like Finsweet’s CMS Nest.