If each file were padded to the nearest MiB, the total download size of the packages containing the nosh toolset would increase by almost 3000% from 1.5MiB to 46MiB. No package is greater than 0.5MiB in size.
I am fairly confident that this case is not an outlier. Out of the 847 packages currently in the package cache on one of my machines, 621 are less than 0.5MiB in size.
You're abusing the notion of a straw man, which this is not.
I am pointing out the consequences of Shasheene's idea as xe explicitly posited it. Xe is free to think about different sizes in turn, but needs to measure and calculate the consequences of whatever size xe then chooses.
No, it would not apply the same with different sizes. Think! This is engineering, and different block sizes make different levels of trade-off. The lower the block size, for example, the fewer packages end up being the same rounded-up size and the easier it is to identify specific packages.
(Hint: One hasn't thought about this properly until one has at least realized that there is a size that Debian packages are already blocked out to, by dint of their being ar archives.)
I am fairly confident that this case is not an outlier. Out of the 847 packages currently in the package cache on one of my machines, 621 are less than 0.5MiB in size.