Thank you all very much for your replies!
Firstly, to answer some questions on the coordinates: The x, y and z values are based on the Dutch national coordinate system, GPS-tagged true to reality.
I sadly am not entirely familiar with how the cloud or its parameters have been generated, as this has been done externally by another company. A lot of details regarding point cloud generation are still new to me. These are very good tips, though: I'll have a look into reformatting and/or compressing the file before I continue with it!
Just a quick additional question, if anyone is willing: if the scale factors and data ranges of this file stand out as strange, what ranges do they normally lie in (more or less)? Asking so that in a future situation, I might be able to identify any unusual values myself, should something like this pop up again.
Regarding the issue itself: using your insights, I have done some more digging. I checked the device I currently employ for working on this point cloud, and found that it makes use of NTFS storage. So that couldn't be the problem. However, after asking around, it turns out there was an older device that the point cloud used to briefly be stored on. We don't currently have access to this device anymore, so I cannot check its storage type, but it is very likely that this device indeed made use of a FAT32 system.
I have e-mailed the company that created the point cloud for us and asked them to send it to us anew. Some quick checks on this 'new' file using both cloudComPy and laspy now immediately confirmed that it had 194,351,196 points, and its size on the disk is 5GB. Loading and manipulating the point cloud in LAStools and Python works flawlessly. Whether it truly was the old computer or another process that cut it off to 32bit, I cannot know for certain, but as it turns out, this was indeed the source of the problem.
Truth be told, I wasn't even familiar with the FAT32 storage type, and wouldn't ever have found this out by myself. Though it caused the necessary headache, I'm glad that I ran into this problem, because I feel like this knowledge will always remain useful in the future. Thank you again for your help!
Op dinsdag 14 februari 2023 om 22:09:35 UTC+1 schreef Jorge Delgado García: