FYI, the only reason SE’s say to limit your pages to less than 100 links is because their crawlers usually only spider that many per page before moving on. Same for page size, the less they have to crawl per page, the faster they can crawl your site and index your pages.
General rule of thumb, under 100 links per page, less than 100,000 bytes in size.
Not required, but it helps your rankings if you stick close to the rule.
Appealing to search engines is about a good mix of averages not extremes.
If they limit you to 100 links per page try using 50-75 instead. Same goes for other general limits and guidelines. Averages not extremes! You would also not want to aim for the low end extreme, aim for somewhere in the middle and all should be well for you in search engines. In addition it leaves room for you to add more later as your site grows!