I think the benefit is that when you start getting inlined code you can have multiple copies of it, so it can multiply out, and ideally you always want your cod

I think the benefit is that when you start getting inlined code you can have multiple copies of it, so it can multiply out, and ideally you always want your code to be as small as possible so that you can have fewer instruction cache misses. So it's unlikely to matter if you're calling a single function in a loop whether the code is 632 bytes or 5KB (well, instruction decoding throughput aside I suppose), but when you're looking more broadly it might matter.