I feel like this made sense for the 1700s United States because everyone there was a recent immigrant—which is to say, people with both the desire and the proven ability to pick up and move to find a place that better suits them.
When you have communities of mostly that type of person, you can just make each community into its own little experiment, and tell everyone to go on a Gulliver's Travels-esque journey to find the right community for them, then settle down.
When your communities, on the other hand, are full of "entrenched" families/clans—groups of people who, for reasons of proximity or tradition, just won't move no matter how bad things get where they're currently living—then the Great Republic Experiment breaks down a little.
Specifically, it breaks because you'll get people who just really don't fit in a place, and would be better suited to some other system of laws available in some other state or municipality... but want to stay where they are anyway, despite suffering strong disutilities. You'll get large numbers of such people, in fact. (See: Detroit.)
A large part of the reason for federalization comes down to helping those people by guaranteeing certain minimum quality-of-life benefits in all those communities, whether the majority there support them or not. Which results in communities that need to share more laws than not, and rapidly lose much of the benefits of separation.
If everyone had kept the "immigrant mentality"—of being willing to drop your existing life to find personal liberty somewhere else—then the US wouldn't much need a federal government (beyond a sort of inverted border-police, working to ensure that people aren't being inhibited by local laws from crossing state lines—a "non-underground" railroad.)
But Americans haven't kept that mentality, and I'm not sure there's a way to re-instill it. It's just, as far as I know, a personality trait—one that happened to have 100% representation in the 18th century US, but then reverted to the mean in their descendants.