The way I see it, 'removing some of the end nodes' is not a viable workaround.
How will the user know if enough nodes have been removed? The preview looks different at different zoom levels and may render/export differently than the preview. So the only way to really know is to remove a few nodes, then export, then remove a couple of nodes and export again ... All the while trying to maintain the integrity of the artwork. ...Then who knows what may happen when exporting at a different size, for example?
This is profoundly unreliable and should have been dealt with long ago... It makes me perceive the software as generally unreliable – one of a few reasons I'm finding it difficult to make the move from Illustrator.