Directionality makes it less inclined to be "maxed out". If you have infrastructure ground stations, and they're built for 5 satellites overhead, you can get 5 times the spectral density total throughput if there's 5 satellites overhead.

> which effectively halve the available bandwidth

I disagree (and I'm not sure where this idea is coming from-- do you think they use the same spectrum or something?) I think they effectively "add" bandwidth for the system by allowing satellites that do not have saturated uplinks to "share" capacity. E.g. a satellite which is mostly over the ocean but can see a ground station can now be more useful.

The downlink/uplink capacity of the satellite that receives data from another or has to send data to another doesn't magically increase. So adding hops reduces the bandwidth available. To reduce it to extremes: if all but one of the satellites used sat-to-sat links and only one had a downlink you'd see a substantial reduction of the available bandwidth per satellite. To a rough approximation the bandwidth available is the bandwidth available to a single sat divided by the number of sats using that one up/down link.

Yes, sat-to-sat enables new use cases. But it also has other effects.

> if all but one of the satellites used sat-to-sat links and only one had a downlink you'd see a substantial reduction of the available bandwidth per satellite.

All the satellites above me have an uplink from a ground station.

Also, satellites above ocean with few people in their footprint can see my uplink but can't use it effectively, because they don't have many users in their footprint (possibly none, because of elevation angle restrictions).

If we have satellite-to-satellite links, then those satellites above ocean can share their bandwidth with satellites above me. Therefore, real system capacity goes up.

Assuming that ground stations are upgraded as the size of the constellation grows-- they're strongly directional. Their throughput is the uplink bandwidth * the spectral efficiency * the number of satellites within LOS of an uplink ground station. Intersatellite links let you use more of this throughput without it going unused and "spoiling"-- that's the main point.