At what exact number of options does "choice" become decision paralysis?

There’s a massive tension in product design right now between data density and cognitive load. Most local discovery and consumer apps seem built on the premise that more data equals a better user experience—so they give you infinite scrolls, hundreds of map pins, and thousands of filtered reviews.

But psychologically, there's a cliff where information stops helping and starts paralyzing.

I’ve been looking at this through the lens of high-volume operations (like a busy commercial kitchen line), where speed and momentum matter more than perfect optimization. If you have too many choices, execution stalls out completely.

When you’re building or using a utility, what is your absolute threshold for constraints? Is there a magic number of choices (3? 5? 10?) where a tool actually becomes useful instead of overwhelming? Or do you still prefer digging through the raw noise?