In the early days I accepted the small blocker argument, but I see that it has been used to make bitcoin less acceptable as p2p unit of exchange with higher fees and RBF. The digital gold idea was taken too literally, so it can't be used for everyday things.

It's almost what establishment wanted. They can't censor it yet, but if Blackrock gets enough control of miners they can cause a major dent in fungibility as sanctioned UTXO's would have to wait much longer for confirmation as only non compliant miners would pick them up from the mempool.

Block size should have kept pace with bandwidth increases over the past decade, but it didn't and we have more centralization. Now projects like .bitmap are starting to force the issue of block size increases.