I suppose logic says that small blocks need to generate massive fees to replace the block reward subsidy.
Massive on-chain transaction fee costs if they were to happen would prevent many people from even being able to make on-chain transactions.
There's also the question of UTXO consolidations which have already exposed small block Bitcoin.
It gets complicated to explain but it's possible to have transaction fee costs greater than the value of the BTC due to UTXOs
Even if BTC were to scale off-chain the Lightning Network white paper points to BTC needing bigger blocks
So it's more than just the Bitcoin White Paper it's also a case of BTC has problems that are conveniently swept aside and replaced with digital number go up pumping