I tried lnav about 7-8 years ago and as a terminal junkie I really liked the features.

The only breaking thing was a huge (almost bloated) memory consumption. At that time lnav basically just kept everything in memory. Does anyone did that change?

According to the linked homepage, the memory usage seems decent (few hundred megs for most use cases when working with a 3.3G logfile). There's a screenshot with various tasks and what the peak memory usage is.

At some point you need to keep quite a large context in memory to have both decent performance and useful features (that aren't unbearably slow to use). lnav seems to land at a reasonable middle ground.