I've said it before (in spite of supporting the small block vision at the time) but in hindsight, Bitcoin actually lost the block size wars.
At the same time, block size isn't the main or even the only reason why activity moved to other chains. That was programmability, and here I don't think Bitcoin should have competed for it.
The idea of having a simple chain optimized for holding + spending in a trust minimized way is a good one. But then its fairly clear to me that you want just a little bit more programmability (e.g. covenants for better custody), bigger blocks, and faster finality.
The challenge was always doing that without creating a technocracy that undermines the immutability concept that underpins it all
It is so sad. Bitcoin usage was growing exponentially up until 2014ish.
And then we collectively told the world we didn't want them using our precious "block space," by keeping the 1 MB limit.
We had more demand than we ever hoped for but rather than building out the infrastructure, we pretended that blockchains couldn't scale. Why?