Tbh the key is to concentrate forces in an event of peer-to-peer air combat. The key to US victory at the Battle of Midway is that they were able to concentrate airpower on to a single point at a critical time. While Japanese failure was the exact opposite, they divide forces and couldn't get enough planes in the sky at one time, even worse they split the focus on the enemy fleet and also the Midway island.
So the paradigm that stretched and spread out geographical area requires also stretched and spread out air assets isn't always a correct assumption. Because the concentration of force beats dispersion of force. During the Japanese invasion, KNIL actually has an adequate number of airstrips spread across the country, but these were proven to be useless due to them being empty or only having a limited number of capable planes. Even if we assume they are all manned equally with a full squadron, that wouldn't be that effective against the Japs fleet anyway, because it would lack concentration of mass. KNIL already failed with their idea of hiding their planes behind, instead of going all out early, which could've struck a major blow to the invasion force.
If we imagine an adversary having 160 planes and we have 60, but they spread that 160 out to 5 different points, hence each squadron of 32 planes, we could still potentially beat them if we could concentrate and combine all or most of these 60 planes at a single point. That's a general idea, so put our situation into that perspective, which one makes more sense, whether we copy the idea of spreading the squadron out? or to concentrate? I personally use this illustration to argue that our geographical area has less to do with how the means or ways our air capability should be developed, because defense policy has a greater impact than geography in my opinion.