My argument is that in some cases large displays make coding more efficient.
In particular when navigating a large codebase, rewriting or refactoring an existing design, and other similar tasks. Your argument sounds to me like "If I write perfect code, I will never need to touch old code again and thus do not need a large screen."
It doesn't matter how big or well designed something is. There are going to be cases where you need to revisit, redesign, or rewrite. Your suggestion that you should just write code perfectly the first time assumes you know the perfect design for the problem at hand — the perfect design is not obvious in many cases, not until your code is used in production and many features have been added on top of it do you begin to think that you can revisit it.
In my case, I am writing a graphics engine, code editor, parser/AST builder, documentation viewer, and project management system. As well as managing documentation and strings localised in 20 different languages.
I have re-written the code editor three times now, each time I have carefully considered the design and how I could proceed with a multi-threaded, efficient editor free from rendering bugs and able to handle large amounts of data. At this point I think I have a great design and implementation, but it is far from perfect. Much of it was developed on my plain old small laptop screen.
Recently I pulled all old networking code from the system and re-wrote it using newer and better high-level APIs that have since become available. This task was benefited by a larger screen because I could look at old and new implementation, while looking at a second new implementation from a different area of the code base as reference — while also still having room for API documentation and related files. It just made things faster, it would still be possible on a small screen.
When I profile the OpenGL graphics engine being able to correlate performance graphs with locations in the code, while displaying GPU buffer contents is something that would feel quite clunky on the command line. It's also faster to be able to glance at this data with my eyes without having to flip between windows / contexts.
So my top level project is complex, but I never claimed it required much screen real estate. It can be more comfortable and faster to perform certain tasks with a large screen — which reduces the need for mental context switching. That's what I'm arguing and I find it hard to understand why you are arguing against this point.
> If so, you have my sympathies.
Your attitude seems quite condescending. As if my code is poorly designed and unmaintainable. This is not the case.
As I said: coding does not require extra screen real estate. It can just be more comfortable and more efficient when you have it.