Your selective quoting ignores how this was a response to a 'how could this possibly work at all'.  I've used the same kind of response to "omg flooding network! how could that possibly work! it's completely non-scalable!" -- to point out that even non-scalable can achieve some remarkable stuff.  This doesn't answer any particular question about the exact tradeoff that works, but works to wake people up.  Particular because before Bitcoin the alternative was exclusively centralized systems so when you show that if you don't care about decentralization (which you must not if you question the value it provides compared to all that came before) then it can reach arbitrarily high scale.

We can't hope to guess at what anyone from back then would think about the current state of the world, though we do know that e.g. the current mining ecosystem would have been regarded as a system failure from the original precepts; and we also know that decentralization and autonomy were principle motivations for the creation of the system in the first place.

While I'm here, hows your Bitcoin Spinoffs project going, Cypherdoc?