Imagine if South Carolina was pushed to this one delegate system in 2020. Bernie Sanders was nearly the nominee and South Carolina began his death spiral. If South Carolina was taken out of play by activists in the state, then either the party would have to forgo its own rules or accept that Bernie would have continued his massive momentum coming out of Nevada.
Likewise if on Super Tuesday Buttigieg and Klobachar would not have dropped out at (supposedly) Obama's instance and backed Biden, then Bernie would have emerged much stronger. One way they could have blunted his momentum is if they saw polling early enough that Bernie was going to take a big state like California, we can't rule out the California machine pushing itself to lose the electoral votes in an effort to stop Bernie and then maybe change back its timeline after the election.
The influence of big states within the party because of electoral votes is pretty small. The state's electoral votes are applied by the citizens of the state. I mean, yeah if you could get 50+% of Texas's voters to credibly promise to vote for the presidential candidate of the party that had an earlier Texas primary they would compete hard for it. But in reality, they're going to vote for the republican nominee. Same logic for California but for the democratic nominee.