What I'm saying is if your contention is that smaller bitcoin = more decentralized and sovereign for users, why not push for 1 KB? 0.25MB? 1 MB seems so arbitrary.

Ok, I'll assume what you say is true about 50MB, but why are 8MB blocks not acceptable? Even assuming zero consumer tech advances over that time 30TB is not that much...you can find 10TB for like ~$50 right now without even digging hard. What is the true bottleneck, bandwidth? Then why not base blocksize off that? A standard deviation or two below the average global internet bandwidth? (spitballing but u get the idea)

It's been a decade and a half and the blocksize has only functionally increased 2x while fees have skyrocketed under any modest demand. That's why other blockchains like Litecoin have absorbed users. BTC may be a SoV for the moment, but people will find substitutes for transacting.

I've recently seen someone describe Bitcoin as a concept that I liked. BTC is the most popular iteration of it atm. But it's like an organism evolving and speciating finding different niches (i.e. BCH, LTC, etc). Bitcoin will never fail, but any individual species might.

So, maybe you're right, it is better that BTC carry on this experimentation path as the most conservative version of Bitcoin.