Have you seen the die images of the ESP32? Basically the entire die area is SRAM. SRAM eats a ton of space, and with a bigger die area you have a much higher likelihood per part that you will have a defect and have to scrap the entire chip.
Nothing a few fuses can't solve.
> Makes sense for massive quantities of crappy cheap flash, not so much for this.
Coming from the x86 world, they use plenty of fuses for everything. I can't imagine a reason why they would not absorb production variation with this for esp32 dies.