[msanlop]

I tried looking for papers on the subject but couldn't find much. There recent research about in-memory B-tree, and there is has been shown that smaller pages (sizes as low as 256/512B) are more performant due to better cache behavior[0]. The general wisdom seems to be that disk-based databases' IO performance is the main bottleneck—but again I couldn't find any concrete data/benchmarks about why those higher sizes were chosen.

[0] There's even some cool research about B-trees that have the layout depend on the probabilistic distribution of the lookups: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3592980.3595316