I knew as soon as I said that, someone was gonna go "BUT METAL ARCHIVES SAYS!!!!!!!!!" Metal Archives definitions mean nothing to me. A majority of those bands probably aren't actually death metal (since MA is going to include every single entry that has ever had the word "death" in the genre descriptor), a large majority of the subset that are death metal have probably never released a full length, and only about 20% of that much smaller number is worth hearing, the rest is shitty local bands or something, garbage that should never see the light of day, like this:
https://www.metal-archives.com/albu...ZF7pkUuF2q2AW72Uv78DGt40stcxMped_Ra8POhymsWlo
Let me clarify and say there's no fucking way on earth that there are 10K purely death metal albums that are even remotely worth listening to. I keep personal archives, an Excel document with bands I listen to, as my own strictly-death-metal database, to exclude the no-name crap that MA includes. Not to say it's anywhere close to completely exhaustive, or ever will be, but it's pretty extensive, sitting just shy of 3000 bands currently.
I also keep a folder on my PC of death metal releases by year, again, to have my personal database. I try to only get main releases, so if a band has full lengths, I don't put every demo in, but if a band only has demos, obviously that's included. This database is sourced from the Excel document, so every band on there is included in this portion. Right now it's got about 6500 entries.
So yeah, TECHNICALLY, there might be 10k full length albums on earth that are actually death metal, not some murky gray area genre like war metal or something, but I promise you that only a fraction of that is anything legitimate. Maybe that's just my weird logic, but you get the idea.