It’s my view that it does today, yes. I’ll happily agree with you that in a long enough view the costs work themselves out – log() scaling things in particular because log() is essentially a constant beyond a certain size. But it’s no surprise that the optimal construction may differ at different parts of Bitcoin’s life.
Sync things aside (which have security model impacts)-- I don’t think Bitcoin is currently at a point where the utxo set size is dominating the costs of running a node: Consider how few nodes run node-limited (though I admit that’s a biased sample because of course it excludes anyone who just didn’t run it at all).
In any case, an insight to be skimmed here I think is that limiting commitments to coins that are unlikely to be spent might change the tradeoff surface-- cause for those you get the space reduction without as much overheads.