There’s no reason you couldn’t. And part of the beauty of patch emails containing full diffs is that you can take them and use whatever tool you want to render them and not be beholden to some dumb web UI’s opinion of what’s “too big.”

The difference is in one case a centralized server is expending a lot of resources to show something to the user, and in the other case it all happens locally and has no effect on the kernel.org infrastructure.

I don't think the issue is with the centralized server, but the browser and the JS components they use. I prefer local anyhow.

Didn't git do exactly that in preparing those emails to be sent? I wonder how long it took for that command to run.

Probably very, very quickly. git-format-patch is very fast; all it has to do is diff the files involved in each commit, which is already heavily optimized. No syntax highlighting (your email program can do that if you want it), or line numbering (ditto).

61.65 seconds to create all 2,298 emails on my computer, with the repository on spinning rust. That’s about one fortieth of a second each on average.

Don't discount the heaviness of rendering the HTML on the client, too!