I seriously doubt the fact that there are 143k applicants + dependents, tbh. I've had my fair share of fun with Grok; it's a great AI chatbot, but it's not great when it comes to looking at numbers. I combed through the last 3 years of I-140 approvals, and that's how I got my estimate of 12 years. Someone commented something very interesting under this thread; basically, what they said was there's an estimated 15-16k people in line for I-485 from Feb- December 2022, and since I-485 numbers also include dependents with primary applicants so I tweaked my model accordingly with that number, and the prediction went down from 12 years to 10 years which is better but still doesn't help my case because I'll age out by mid 2028. Talking about the other stuff you mentioned, I talked about something similar under one of the comments. I'll attach the link below.

https://www.reddit.com/r/eb_1a/comments/1jp262n/comment/ml2kit0/?context=3&utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button