No matter what advice you give people, they're still basically going to do what they want. Many will prefer to join larger servers, and some will always prefer smaller ones.
Honestly I think we should worry way less about this, because Lemmy is FOSS and we have enough solid instances already. People will naturally find their way and if larger instances get power drunk, people will leave. We don't need to try to orchestrate and fine tune what instances people use. Let them do what they want, and trust that the decentralized and redundant federated structure will function as intended.
It should only come into play if large instances actually can't keep up with their userbase growth from a technological standpoint. But again that problem solves itself because they can just close sign ups.