That's true, but only part of the story of the blocksize wars. Remember the winning side ("small blockers") also increased block size with segwit. This was much more a story of who controls the chain and what its purpose was than literally "should we tweak some config"
Have you read [The Blocksize War](https://amzn.to/3vXF0CR)? (I haven't yet.)
From Ammous' book: Increased block sizes means more storage space needed for plebs to run nodes, leading to fewer nodes, leading to increased centralization, thus increasing possibility of a 51% attack. So the smaller blocksize is meant to improve decentralization of nodes, thus securing the network.