We show that in the regime when strong disorder is more relevant than field quantization the superfluid--to--Bose-glass criticality of one-dimensional bosons is preceded by the prolonged logarithmically slow classical-field renormalization flow of the superfluid stiffness at mesoscopic scales. With the system compressibility remaining constant, the quantum nature of the system manifests itself only in the renormalization of dilute weak links. On the insulating side, the flow ultimately reaches a value of the Luttinger parameter at which the instanton--anti-instanton pairs start to proliferate, in accordance with the universal quantum scenario. This happens first at astronomic system sizes because of the suppressed instanton fugacity. We illustrate our result by first-principles simulations.