Units being drawn past icon distance; Chobby overrides LOD dist setting

[Histidine91]

User Goo on Discord describes the following issue:

• The game has low framerate when zoomed out, apparently because unit models are still being drawn even after they turn into icons.
  • I couldn't trivially repro this.

@Goo am I understanding this correctly?
icon distance 150, LOD distance 9999 = units are drawn as icons when zoomed out, low FPS
icon distance 150, LOD distance = units are still drawn as icons when zoomed out, high FPS

About question:
ico dist 150, LOD 9999(default) and no matter how long i scroll down - all units are drawn in 3d and in 2d icons. I dont even see 3d models under icons, but if i angle camera - its there. And of course - huge fps drops.
ico dist 150, LOD 180 (slightly more than 150 to alighn with camera angle) - all units rdawn in 3d when i am scrolled close to scene and all units drawn as 2d icons when scrolled far. - no fps drops, and in fact a little boost in performance.

• Setting unit LOD distance to a low value generates a significant improvement in framerate. However, something resets unit LOD distance to 9999 after every game (I think it's this).
  • Running as administrator doesn't do anything, and setting springsettings.cfg to read-only causes the game to crash on start.
  • I could repro this problem, with non-Steam ZK on Ubuntu 18.04.

So we have two layers of problem here:

• Unit models are apparently being drawn way past unitIconDist.
• Chobby is overriding unit LOD distance setting when it starts up.

[sprunk]

Check how this works with luaui (and luarules?) disabled. Lua can draw the model on its own even past icon zoomout (check out the commander red/blue morph effect for instance) so perhaps some sort of this effect could be causing this.

The simple solution would probably be for LOD distance to be tied to icon distance.

[sprunk]

ico dist 150, LOD 9999(default) and no matter how long i scroll down - all units are drawn in 3d and in 2d icons.

Engine source says iconized units are not drawn: https://github.com/spring/spring/blob/maintenance/rts/Rendering/UnitDrawer.cpp#L562

Does the user have default settings? There are widgets that override disticon with hueg values and draw icons on top of models on their own:
https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K/blob/master/LuaUI/Widgets/gui_icontransition.lua
https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K/blob/master/LuaUI/Widgets/gui_iconheight.lua
After asking it looks like he has these two disabled.