The dashboard is supposed to load data incrementally ie. none, up to 50
With respect to the ‘Load All’ button, After landing on the dashboard (or after a page refresh), we can see it has loaded the first set of 50 records as highlighted in the screenshot below.
In this case, it does make sense that the the ‘rows per page' is blank since there aren’t any other pages to show. If you pay close attention, the arrows in the highlighted bit are also greyed out.
Only after clicking on ‘Load All’. it then goes and loads all the data. In my case, this is 2000+ records, and pagination (rows per page then comes into effect) as you can see from the screenshot below:
The above has been done purely on the basis of performance.