The true reason is purely historical.
Editor where just TOO SLOW to handle big files (on DOS they often were limited to 64kb, if not less)
Please note that I love "modular code", hence the notion of "sections" in my big file.
To clarify: I love to edit one big file, but for other purposes I definitely need small ones.
What I am basically proposing is that it is easier to edit multiple files from within a single window/buffer. But there exist no editors that do that AFAIK
I am not the only one, see this Python tool for Vim: http://coliveira.net/software/editing-multiple-files-in-a-si...
The "one big file" gets processed so that each section is kept in sync with a file.
Again: the idea is about make editing easier, it's an addition, your "one big file" is just a compound "view" over atomic files.
Splitting windows in vim works nicely for this purpose.
You can see this by opening a file, and hitting "<Ctrl-W> <Ctrl-S>" to split the window. Do some editing and you'll see it in both places. ":ls" will show only one buffer. And if you have display of the buffer state visible, when you ":w" all the windows will update to say they were saved.