Satoshi Nakamoto may have intentionally slowed Bitcoin adoption early on.
Yes, but probably not in a way you think. It was true, but related to mining:
We should have a gentleman's agreement to postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can for the good of the network. It's much easer to get new users up to speed if they don't have to worry about GPU drivers and compatibility. It's nice how anyone with just a CPU can compete fairly equally right now.
See? It was possible to generate more coins with GPUs, but he wanted to slow things down, because then, more CPU users could mine their coins directly. And you can also confirm it, if you compare "prenet" version, shared in 2008, with the first official one: it required 20-bit blocks for testnet, and 40-bit blocks for mainnet (which is why the Genesis Block has more than 40 leading zero bits), but he lowered that from 40-bit to 32-bit, just to make CPU mining easier.
And if you compare block times, you can also see some artifacts from prenet, because the time between blocks was more like 15 minutes, instead of 10 minutes.
This is not really pertaining to bitcoin users though, more to bitcoin miners. And even though having lots of reliable miners is one of the prerequisites to supporting a lot of users, it seems that any sort of limit was going to be a powder keg in igniting debates between (then) bitcoin developers.
You have coins like Bitcoin SV with their 1 GB block size, for example.
There was no one parameter value that was gonna make people happy.
It can be argued that the developer contingent that built Lightning Network only gotten so much support because most of the L1 purists left the project over big blocks.