Note: Summary at the end.
Recently we were tasked to build a listing page in Drupal which would list down 200+ products on same page. It was already built in the system with pager, search-api facets and sort and some other custom features like showing thumbnail gallery for each product, triggering GA impression for each and many such things. So obviously choice of implementation was to keep using search-api for this to get the advantage of re-using the functionality and to avoid building facets.