I guess "utter nonsense" is much worse than regular "nonsense".
It is. By a long shot.
There is still a good point to make here, which is that large parties for me become very tedious as the levels increase.
I don't see the good point? In fact, it's the exact other way around for me.
The more the game goes, the more a smaller party feels like an unbearable restriction that CRIPPLES tactical variety. Always using the same limited number of classes, always having too little room to allow for different party composition and experimentation, always feeling basically pressured to reserve most of the available slots for critical roles, rather than feeling encouraged to experiment with different things.
Also "more characters to manage in each round" typically means having to go through LESS rounds in general, as you'll tend to synergize better and dispatch more enemies quicker.
It also means having more incentives to deal honestly with your own failures and misses, because having two characters put to sleep/incapacitated in a party of six is a relatively minor annoyance, having it in a party of fours can mean being forced to a reload.
And the claim that the combat in D&D "isn't supposed to be a combat simulator" is highly questionable in itself and only justifiable if you accept a very narrow definition of what "simulation" is supposed to mean in context.
because that's exactly what it is: a tactical combat simulation inspired by old war games in its core mechanics.
Well, these are just few of the twenty or more different arguments I could (and I already did) throw on the plate of this specific topic.
There's also the little incentive to make use of a larger variety of loot, there's being precluded from experiencing a larger number of questlines, there's not being allowed ANY room for "role redundancy", etc, etc, etc.
