I think there are probably very much diminishing returns.
A small scene is probably pretty damn good at the top. Having hundreds of thousands of competitive players helps, but even with a small sample you are probably likely to get at least some very, very strong players.
It's hard to think of a relevant real world example, but a fun corollary I'm familiar with is Fedex (Federico Perez Ponsa). He is a full chess Grandmaster, #461 in the world in chess amongst ~300k active FIDE players. By your "International Masters study hard" logic, when you drop him into Age of Empires 2, a game with ~500 competitive tournament players, his work ethic should dominate. But it turns out that the top ~100 AoE2 players are really damn good and practice a ton (easily chess IM amounts), and Fedex tops out around ~#50 in the world.
A small scene is probably pretty damn good at the top. Having hundreds of thousands of competitive players helps, but even with a small sample you are probably likely to get at least some very, very strong players.
It's hard to think of a relevant real world example, but a fun corollary I'm familiar with is Fedex (Federico Perez Ponsa). He is a full chess Grandmaster, #461 in the world in chess amongst ~300k active FIDE players. By your "International Masters study hard" logic, when you drop him into Age of Empires 2, a game with ~500 competitive tournament players, his work ethic should dominate. But it turns out that the top ~100 AoE2 players are really damn good and practice a ton (easily chess IM amounts), and Fedex tops out around ~#50 in the world.
https://ratings.fide.com/profile/117927 https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/Fedex