That is beautiful work

I can't help wondering though, has anyone had success with fewer, larger caps? From what I can see, all the grounds are on the centre pad, all the pins on 3-sides are commoned internally to VDD, then split out to dozens of tiny caps, via'ed down to the ground plane. Does this have some inductance or ESR benefit, are the caps just cheaper, or is this just a design that works, so why mess with it?