"and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase."

You say it like this is a law set in stone, because this is what happened im history, but I would argue it happened under different conditions.

Mainly, the main advantage of an empire over small villages/tribes is not at all that they have more power than the villages combined, but that they can concentrate their power where it is needed. One village did not stand a chance against the empire - and the villages were not coordinated enough.

But today we would have the internet for better communication and coordination, enabling the small entieties to coordinate a defense.

Well, in theory of course. Because we do not really have autonomous small states, but are dominated by the big players. And the small states have mowtly the choice which block to align with, or get crushed. But the trend might go towards small again.

(See also cheap drones destroying expensive tanks, battleships etc.)

Internet is working exactly the opposite way to what your describing - it's making everything more centralized. Once we had several big media companies in each country and in each big city. Now we have Google and Facebook and tik tok and twitter and then the "whatevers".

NETWORK effect is a real thing