This may have been true 100 years ago when economic development was necessary to provide basic quality of life, like electricity and water, to citizens. But these days when the marginal product is something like Facebook/Twitter (at least in advanced western economies), I'm not so sure.
You bring up a very good point about scale economy. Economies of scale were the driver of the industrial era paradigm.
Probably the time of economies of scale is almost over. That means that capital doesn't need to be deployed at scale anymore, which means that the fiat system is almost over. That would explain why the fiat system now mostly creates garbage like FB/TW (data exploitation at scale). Hopefully, the data exploitation at scale might be upended by Nostr, decentralized AI, and new decentralizing inventions that may come.