Don't things normally get more efficient with scale?

Do you consider large organizations more or less efficient than smaller ones?

With something complex like passports? That's the kind of thing that scales up. A small country that doesn't produce many passports, and doesn't have many complicated cases, doesn't need to be able to manage them very well. Something with more people going through the system is more robust and better tested and has the corner cases worked out.

For example if you do 1 passport a day you can't have a dedicated person handling for example issues caused by dual nationalities. If you do 1000 a day you can have someone who just handles that and knows exactly how to do it.

A tech example would be that Google knows exactly how to get a worker a visa as they do it all the time and they're very efficient at it. A little startup might have no idea what they're doing and would be very inefficient at it.

Sure, but imagine if Google was really good at something that was inefficient, like 8-11 week passport generation using old techniques and then try to change it?

The larger the org the harder it is to change in big ways (at least in my experience)

Most of the time, large organizations are much, much, MUCH more efficient.

Even with organizational overhead.

Which is more efficient: Distributing thousands of books by pallet in large, predictable quantities of pallets, to a limited number of Amazon warehouses or sending a single box of 20 books to thousands of bookstores?

That's a very shitty excuse. Those things can scale, and get more efficient with scale, especially when you have multiple times the revenue too.