This is false. Pyramid was not known as "repoze" which is a project to port interesting/good pieces of code from Zope to be standalone libraries of code.

Pyramid used to be known as repoze.bfg or just bfg. It made liberal use of modern "light-weight" framework architecture decisions along with much more advanced and flexible workflows and code introduced through other repoze.* libraries (from Zope).

In general though, I agree that Pyramid is well suited for large projects and ill-suited for small ones. Although I do use it for my small projects.