What would be a fix or migration for phpMyAdmin's 20,000 row limitation and is anything really unstable?

Question

I am working with large amounts of data and starting to get odd behavior when checking my data in phpMyAdmin. Row counts display ~ prefixes when count is high,

Answer 1

If you're using InnoDB tables, approximate counts are one of its "things", as described here. It has nothing really to do with phpMyAdmin. phpMyAdmin is just a frontend for the database and it relies on the data given by the database; if the database can only supply approximate counts quickly, then that's it.

And since phpMyAdmin is only a tool to simplify basic interactions with the database, I don't see the big issue. It shouldn't be your primary tool to browse through 800 pages of data to begin with. But, if you'd follow the hints provided by phpMyAdmin, you'd end up with a solution here.