> once you miss a week and suddenly you have 863 reps to get through to catch up.
You only have to "catch up" ASAP if you want to minimize the risk of forgetting any card at all, and then having to memorize it again. Otherwise, just working through the backlog at your preferred pace is the best strategy; you'll still be recalling most of the cards and the system will push repetitions for those that you do recall further out in time.
Perhaps the Anki devs should add some kind of special workflow in the UX that shows up when the user has a huge backlog to go through due to missed reviews, and tells them this. Because you're right that just seeing a bare number (863 cards to go through!) can be quite scary.
You only have to "catch up" ASAP if you want to minimize the risk of forgetting any card at all, and then having to memorize it again. Otherwise, just working through the backlog at your preferred pace is the best strategy; you'll still be recalling most of the cards and the system will push repetitions for those that you do recall further out in time.
Perhaps the Anki devs should add some kind of special workflow in the UX that shows up when the user has a huge backlog to go through due to missed reviews, and tells them this. Because you're right that just seeing a bare number (863 cards to go through!) can be quite scary.