The theory for bigger carriers was sound.
No it wasn't. A nation has to live according to its budget. To have had four smaller carriers would have been much more flexible and probably cheaper (economies of scale) than two large ones. It was the most stupid idea ever, and who knows why the Admiralty fell for it.
Utter hoop I'm afraid. Every single study by any nation on taking aircraft to sea since the 1970s has conclusively demonstrated that both in terms of UPC and also operating costs, economy of scale favours larger ships. Or do you really think duplicating the required facilities and personnel for ops across more ships can somehow work out cheaper?
The external stores issue is to allow for flexibility in a situation where additional weapons / fuel might be more useful for that particular situation than an LO configuration.
As for the debate on aarse about survivability, that too is being conducted from a level of misconception as to STOVL ops. The nub of the argument appears to be that "a bomb crater" in the flightdeck will preclude cat n'trap operations. This conveniently misses the point that there will be two cats in different locations and also that without access to a ski-ramp and it's runway, which is a larger target than a cat and might therefore be statistically more likely to suffer damage, STO becomes VTO which is just about enough to get you off the deck to circle the ship and then land again. There are some detailed differences in survivability between the two modes, but the actual delta is literally in single figures of percent.
These things have been done to death years ago if you know where to look.