A too-large system is oppressively average.

The only way to interact with other components at scale is with metrics and summary statistics. Nuance is lost.

Everything with the very large boundary is averaged together into one low-variance mush.

Escaping this mushy average with something that stands out can become extraordinarily expensive.

You have to justify a different way of doing things that goes against the gravity well dynamics.

The effort to create seeds of greatness in an a sea of oppressive averageness is possible... but cannot be understood by the system itself.

"70% of your time you spend working as a role model for your function. 30% of your time you spend on kooky stuff. And then you regularly have lucky miracles. It would be easier to get promoted if you stopped wasting time on the kooky stuff."

"... How do you think I get so lucky?"

One thing large systems are very good at is hill-climbing the mountain they have already started successfully climbing, with huge momentum.