Yea, Ver was sorta like the Andreas of the early early days. He was maybe the first "bitcoin influencer" that was well known.

Thats one of the things that made the blocksize wars so difficult to navigate, no one could predict who the market would follow....Remember Vers goal always was to force Bitcoin to be more MoE....and he was anti SoV narrative, so current Maxis like to shit on Ver, but in reality its a bit of historical revisionism....history is written by the victors as they say.

The big block argument, devoid of the massive fighting, was a reasonable argument. It turned out to be wrong, and it turned out keeping block sizes small was the best balance for decentralization combined with offloading using L2s. But at the time it was tough to know that....