As of #4427 it is easier to see that the DataFusion parquet reader still defaults to reading the last 4 bytes of a parquet file (which contains the metadata length) and then does a second read to read the footer.
Doing two IO operations is likely non ideal, especially for object storage where the cost of an additional read is very expensive relative to reading a bit more data in the first read.
The suggestion is to default reading the last 64k of a parquet file to try and capture the entire footer in a single read
Originally posted by @thinkharderdev in #3885 (comment)