Research runs on a variety of scales - but "check if this new idea/method/architecture isn't completely dumb on small scale before trying to scale up" is a common enough pattern. And most of those fail on small scale.
Yep, most of what's remaining fails to scale. But it's still a very solid filter.
Sure, there are things that don't work on small scale and then work on large scale. But they're rare, and they sure are going to be expensive to find and validate.