Anyone know if AdapterList uses RecylerView? And if it does, how does it distinguish between the different row types? It seems like it would be very hard for it to do that.

It doesn't use RV. It doesn't have the concept of row "type", it just uses the structural identity of the items themselves.

Out of curiosity, is there an equivalent which would take advantage of recyclerview so that jank is mimimized.

The jank is probably temporary. You should expect a ton of improvement on this front so I wouldn’t necessarily try to avoid it. It will only result in tech debt as you will probably want to move back to it anyway.

AdapterList/LazyColumnsFor is lazy, just like RV