Your exact intuition about the implausibility of many large effect sizes is called the “Piranha problem” by my favourite statistician Andrew Gelman first here in a blog post: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/12/15/eats/

And then as a published paper: https://sites.stat.columbia.edu/gelman/research/published/pi...

> how many explanatory variables can have large effects on an outcome?