> I think Wyoming joining the US as a state without equal representation as the most populous state would still be a massive win for them and they would have almost certainly taken the deal at the time.
I doubt that very much. But more pertinent is this: we know for a fact that the smaller founding states would not have joined without the compromise in how Congress is structured. They were, after all, the whole reason it exists. So without that compromise, the country would not exist at all (or would at minimum exist very differently to today). You can't just renege on that deal 250 years later and figure people should be ok with it.
I think it's completely fine to renege on deals that were made with people who have been dead for centuries, actually, if there's a good reason to.
Courts and political institutions routinely nullify all kinds of "deals" that are considered to be against public policy. For instance, lots of people in the US made legally binding deals to purchase other human beings as slaves, and those deals were undone by the 13th amendment. Maybe those people would have made different life choices if they knew that their slaves would be freed in the future. Tough luck.
A bunch of states wouldn't have entered the union without the compromise on slavery.
But we ended that "compromise" some time ago. No reason that equal Senate representation, or even general state "sovereignty" couldn't be revisited either.
I doubt that very much. But more pertinent is this: we know for a fact that the smaller founding states would not have joined without the compromise in how Congress is structured. They were, after all, the whole reason it exists. So without that compromise, the country would not exist at all (or would at minimum exist very differently to today). You can't just renege on that deal 250 years later and figure people should be ok with it.