Can't you just raise $wgRCMaxAge? And if you can't, are you sure the reason is not precisely to avoid such long-spanning queries?

I don't think that would be the best approach. If the problem is long queries, I would expect that the sensible approach is to limit them by a maximum number of revisions to fetch, rather than the maximum age of such revisions.

After all, it is more likely that mass vandalism goes unnoticed in low-activity wikis which have few edits spread across a long period of time (which would be unnecessarily cut off from Nuke's reach due to their age), than in high-activity wikis where editors would eventually bump into, and revert the vandalism in the normal course of wiki maintenance.

Yes but older pages are also more likely to have subsequent revisions, that's probably the rationale. Anyway, I'm not qualified to answer on what's the best approach here, just reminding those who can do so that raising $wgRCMaxAge is a possible approach (translatewiki.net sets it at 5 years).

@Ladsgroup (informally) noted at Wikimedia-Hackathon-2024 that it's likely Nuke could be changed to use the Revision table with a sensible time limit (e.g. 1 year) that's longer than the recentchanges limit.