Yes, I'm digressing. Guilty as charged. Nevertheless, I think it's a somewhat-on-topic digression.
If there's a wall at 2,000 lines, almost all language-advocacy examples are below that wall. That's the first wall. But language choice doesn't get interesting until you ask what the language does at the 20,000-line wall or the 200,000-line wall. Nobody talks about this when they advocate a language (except, as I said, Go). The closest are Haskell and Lisp, and their claim is that you can write the same program in fewer lines (so that you don't hit any of the walls as quickly).
It's worth noting that a big part of the Common Lisp spiel was that it was suitable for very large applications which needed to be maintained for a long time. So the two (terseness and large-scale development) need not be mutually exclusive.
(On the line of your point, though, maybe it's a shame that relatively-verbose languages like Ada and Modula-3 became social pariahs because their virtues are hard to demonstrate in the small.)
If there's a wall at 2,000 lines, almost all language-advocacy examples are below that wall. That's the first wall. But language choice doesn't get interesting until you ask what the language does at the 20,000-line wall or the 200,000-line wall. Nobody talks about this when they advocate a language (except, as I said, Go). The closest are Haskell and Lisp, and their claim is that you can write the same program in fewer lines (so that you don't hit any of the walls as quickly).