I get how the pretty-looking features might be welcome on the surface, but this is the same as the ‘Admin’ screen introduced in 4.3 (and it wasn’t optional – as soon as we updated, all stores defaulted to it) – and I’ve had nothing but problems with it.

It tries to compile stats for every order ever placed (even if you tell it to NOT do that…), but when you’ve got a store that’s been running since 2013 with over a million orders, all it does is crash the database over and over and over again. And I’m not talking about a small-scale shared-hosting stack: I’m talking about a dedicated RDS DB server that was scaled up to 24 cores with 256gb of memory still getting trashed by the queries created by this new WC home screen.

The only foolproof way I found to get around it was to add this line:

add_filter('woocommerce_admin_disabled', '__return_true');

…which stopped the endless monster queries.