It’s always a trade off of many dimensions. Usually, if you are looking at resistance (pulling weight, navigating water, ...) more than speed, a bigger and slow

It’s always a trade off of many dimensions. Usually, if you are looking at resistance (pulling weight, navigating water, ...) more than speed, a bigger and slower engine provides the torque you want at low engineering costs, more resilience, less cooling constraints ... For some cultural reasons, American muscle cars featured big relatively slow but torquey engines compared to their Italian counterparts.