I agree that it was a closer thing than the modern narrative suggests -- as you say, the winners have formed the story in a way favorable to themselves -- and it could easily have gone the other way. (It's a fun exercise to steelman the big block position, there are compelling arguments to be made there.)

I'd say that, in the early days of btc, there was a giant and (it later became clear) somewhat nebulous commitment as to what btc really was, at its most fundamental essence. Satoshi himself was unclear about this in the way he talked about it at first, which should be no surprise, since the essence of the system was revealing itself in the environment in which it found itself, and these things can't be foreseen in systems of non-trivial complexity. In the course of the blocksize war, the different commitments were crystallized, and in the end one held together better. In parlance bitcoiners seem to like, the commitment that held together became a Schelling point.

But many participants would have been happier with either, I'm under no illusion about that.