I understand that emails can get buried but threaded views are so much better for me (especially at work) than my inbox being buried by conversations/threads that I have zero interest in. My alternative would probably be to more aggressively filter but that would effectively mean I never even saw lots of things I might actually care about.
You can choose to do that: Settings / General / Conversation view off
It's so much better to simply have emails in the order they arrive instead of hunting them down in "conversations".