My view is that the association is silly. The max_blocksize rule was added by Satoshi after the system was already running, in order to remove an attack vector via spamming of the transaction queue, until such time as a more elegant solution could be found.
That's not quite true. Version 1.0 didn't have a 1MB limit, but instead used the same 0x2000000 byte, or 32MiB limit, used for any serialized data. Satoshi later added MAX_BLOCK_SIZE so that miners wouldn't create blocks bigger than 1MB, but larger was still accepted.
Finally the hard limit was reduced by Satoshi to 1MB in commit
172f006020965ae8763a0610845c051ed1e3b522 The commit comment is deliberately misleading: "only accept transactions sent by IP address if -allowreceivebyip is specified"
How was I "not quite true"? Because I didn't bother to specify details? Was I wrong about the reasons for the change? The comment wasn't deliberately misleading, either. There was a change to prevent direct to IP connections, as that had become viewed as a potential security risk. If the comment was wrong, that was likely accidental.