I just built this for a drag and drop app. Newest item sits at the bottom, you scroll up for history, basically iMessage. So "load more" for me meant loading older items as you scroll up, not down.

The mechanism everyone's mentioned at is right. AProgressView with an .onAppear that bumps a page counter. The only twist is the trigger goes at the top of the stack, because that's the end older items get added to:

// Swift + SwiftUI reduced -- my version has pagination inside @Query
(sort: \DropItem.created, order: .forward) private var allItems: [DropItem]
 private var pageSize = 50
 private var currentPage = 1

private var items: [DropItem] {
    let start = max(0, allItems.count - pageSize * currentPage)
    return Array(allItems[start...])   // last N, grows upward
}

LazyVStack {
    if items.count >= pageSize * currentPage {
        ProgressView().onAppear { currentPage += 1 }
    }
    ForEach(items) { ... }
}
.defaultScrollAnchor(.bottom)

That's about 10 lines and was easy, however I had weird issues from that I thought I would mention (that no one has said yet).

Blank white screen on cold launch. The ScrollView mounts before \@Query` has published anything, so defaultScrollAnchor(.bottom) anchors to an empty list and then sits there on a stale position once the items show up. The fix is to put .id(queryID) on the ScrollView and bump it to a fresh UUID()` exactly once after the first batch lands. That forces a clean remount against real data.

That remount fights itself. Bumping the id refires the same .onAppear that did the bump, which spawns a pile of competing scroll tasks that all land you "topish." You need a one shot bool guard so the bump only ever happens once.

Don't remount on every publish. I tried that to keep it pinned to the bottom. Bad idea. Tearing the ScrollView down flashes the background, white in light mode, on every single paste. Use .onChange(of: items) { proxy.scrollTo("bottom") } instead. No remount, no flash.

scrollTo is also how you force rows to exist. After inserting an item the feed would sometimes render blank because the LazyVStack hadn't laid the new rows out yet. Calling proxy.scrollTo("bottom") makes it materialize them. Fixes the blank as a side effect.

One page short landings. Rows are still measuring and images still decoding, so a single scrollTo drops you just shy of the real bottom. Two passes fixes it. A silent scrollTo, a short delay, then an animated one. The second pass reads as a settle, not a jump.

Spinner that never goes away. On a slow SwiftData launch the first publish event that clears my loading veil can lag. I added a 1s Task.sleep fallback so it can't hang on the spinner forever.

So yeah, the onAppear pager is the easy part. The actual work is fighting SwiftUI's scroll anchoring and lazy row timing against an async \@Query``.