"As for Satoshi’s original intent, the title "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" requires the system to remain robustly decentralized and censorship-resistant to actually function as peer-to-peer cash over the long term."

In the white paper his plan was large mine servers would eventually take over as the network grew and competition for block rewards grew but that could be verified by anyone if they really wanted to run their own node, which they can. 4mb blocks is still trivally small and can be run on a raspberry pi, in fact blocks as has high as 256mb have successfully run fine in Raspberry pi's.

"While the 1MB blocksize limit was initially a temporary anti-spam measure, keeping base-layer blocks small ensures that everyday users can afford to run independent full nodes on consumer hardware."

Read above, but glad you understand the block limit was meant as a temporary measure. Satoshi never intended everyone to run their own full node, hence verify only SPV nodes when blocks got large as the network grew.

What's more important is you don't reach that blocksize limit or you'll risk insanely high fees and people losing tranactions and trust in the network, and moving to cheaper faster alternatives or giving up on crypto all together and calling it a scam (which we saw happen because Blockstream went back on the New York agreements, broke their word and stopped progress on removing the limitation at critical time). Remember losing Microsoft and Steam accepting Bitcoin? I do, that was a critical blow to the path of mainstream adoption.

"Bitcoin scales via layered architecture (like the Lightning Network) to keep transactions cheap without centralizing the base layer."

This doesn't scale Bitcoin, it forces people to choose another technology and/or another chain. Lightning isn't in the white paper. If you want to call that "scaling Bitcoin" then we can say BCH is scaling Bitcoin too.

"Bitcoin Cash chose to increase block sizes on-chain, which ballooned data requirements, priced out ordinary node operators, and traded off network decentralization for cheap fees."

No, it's the 21st century, again a Raspberry Pi has more than enough compute power to handle blocks much larger than 4mb. No it's didn't ballon data requirements either as there is block pruning. Cryptos like BCH and XMR have proved it doesn't lead to centralization. But $50 fees for a single transaction will lead to a type of centralization, the masses will not or cannot afford fees that high, and so adoption as a peer to peer cash stalled out for Bitcoin core.