For my company's table UX, we want to make filters configurable outside the table itself via a menu system. This is similar to filter "pills" which can be added by selecting a column name to filter on. They are initialized with a default empty value, and the user can immediately add a more meaningful filter value in the menu. Removal of filters happens in this menu as well, by explicit action from the user.

I can't figure out how to achieve this with Tanstack Table's filter system, even after I overrode all built-in filterFn options with versions that have .autoRemove = () => false;. So I dug into the source and found this. It appears that the library enforces removing filters if their value is empty regardless of autoRemove?

I think this behavior is surprisingly opinionated for such an otherwise versatile tool. Can that logic be changed to utilize ?? instead, so that any autoRemove supplied value will be considered authoritative? Or better yet, can autoRemove be globally configurable, so I don't have to override all the default filter functions at all?

Marked as Q&A because hopefully there's a way to do this I didn't notice.