My take on this old chestnut is simply: aperture rules.
The notion that larger apertures require better seeing to work as well as a smaller scope is just plain wrong. The reality is with a larger scope you can actually detect the difference in the seeing, which small aperture users are blissfully unaware of most nights. There is a secondary benefit to a larger aperture, as while the airy disks may well turning in to "fuzz balls", they stay put on the focal plane. Whereas with a small scope they are bouncing all over the place. Think of a container ship that just sits there in a light chop, then look at a tinny on the same seas...it will be bouncing all over the place.
Careful what you wish for however. To get a reasonable field of view, larger scopes also require larger sensors, larger pixels, larger filters, larger diameter field correctors and much beefier focusers etc. Then there is the mount.....and the fact you need to permanently house all of this big stuff somewhere. Things get very expensive very quickly.
That said, I can think of no better example of the aperture rules mantra other than to point to the Chart32 team's results. Simply awesome imagery that you just can't get from an 71mm refractor
P.S. I did
this roll-over a while back..while the image brightness looks similar, the larger scope shows more fine detail.