If you actually mean increase block size when you said "scale", most likely it'll happen after all viable scaling option is exhausted.
That is EXACTLY what I am afraid of. Bitcoin is being treated like a hobby project not "money for the world". And what I mean by that is if we wait until all other options are exhausted we will no longer be a contender for money for the world. In other words it will be too late.
If we want to be digital gold then we will probably end up somewhere in the top 10. We will become the Peter Schiff of crypto.
I strongly disagree that Bitcoin is treated as hobby project when protocol upgrade usually took years for very thoughtful testing and few months for activation to ensure the network is ready. But increasing block size isn't exactly easy task either due to various reasons such as,
1. It require hard fork (which mean many people must upgrade their software).
2. Determining "correct" block size limit that majority people could agree. Arbitrary number? By current demand? By hardware/internet growth?
So there are about 15,000 nodes and each one would need to upgrade to 1TB hard drives?
It's not just storage, but also the bandwidth and propagation speed of larger blocks. You can see my post above about large blocks on BSV leading to frequent stale blocks and chain re-orgs. For you to receive a block from me, I first have to download it, validate it, and then send it to you. The larger the blocks the longer this takes. The longer this takes, the slower the propagation through the network. The slower the propagation, the more chance of another miner finding a block at the same height and causing a chain split.
Don't forget storage speed and computational power as well. For example to run ETH full node, you're forced to use SSD.