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Never
Not 2025 anyway.
Although they've reduced the world updates so much at this point that just halving the rate another time probably wouldn't really make a noticable difference to anyone Sony listens to anyway..
The reason why you're not getting more players is
a) the game has already been tweaked to a specific target for the ps5. It's running heavily towards graphics filters that are forced in on the driver level that takes a lot of resources and frame-time to generate. And the ps5 OS runs a number of components in the background that can't be interrupted. Resources that are necessary for these to run are reserved, and they will not be used. So if there was a way to worm out better performance from the game (which there certainly is in theory on the hardware on the ps5), they would have to disable mandated functions that have to be running in the background. That's not going to happen. More than that - now that the target has been set, changes to the game will be made that make use of available resources to further enhance these mandated functions.
b) the "industry standard" requirement for online games is that you cannot use more than 8kb/s upload speed. And you cannot under any circumstance require the game to spend more than 5kb/s upload for the client. The game used to be more dynamic, and happily make use of 20kb/s+ to get more stable updates - this has been removed. The reason for that is not to make the game run more quickly or stable - it's to specifically placate the US market, where ISPs still - in 2025 - sell people "broadband" with the definition FCC gives that. Which is as low as an asyncronous adsl-connection with as little as 4-5kb/s upload. In Africa broadband is defined with significantly higher speeds than that. But in the US, it is legal to sell people "broadband", even on fiber-optic connections, that scale down the upload during the day to as little as 5kb/s, never mind fully traffic-shape everything you get -- without having to call it something else than "high speed internet broadband", or whatever.
That's just the reality. So if you don't want people in the US to complain about a game lagging like crazy - you are going to have to make it use less than 8kb/s upload. And you also have to fragment the network frames(the MTU) at a very low size compared to anywhere else in the world. This is basically halving the network frame size, and introducing twice the latency to any package coming through. And there's no workaround for that once you are inside the USA bubble.
Meaning that when you cannot get, say, 8 players in a teamwork game on a console - including with Helldivers 2 - the reason for that is the industry standard that is required to "get in" in the US market. You could always make the updates much less frequent, and just lower the fidelity of the world updates. But that would introduce problems on it's own that would be associated with visual lag. So you don't do that.
And that's the actual reason - and it has been that since 2006. In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, there was a test-build -- on the ps3, by the way, not just on PC -- that ran it with 32 players. That's not a big deal. The bf3 release had that, too. And it was chosen to have 16 players on the ps3 version because of these "market concerns". EA made that completely clear. And the Sony people went and said, and I quote, "we feel that 16 players is a good number for this kind of game".
It was just a blanket statement that had nothing whatsoever to do with programming, the engine capability, or the hardware it was running on. It was a pure marketing decision, that they made in the belief that if they put the "conquest"-games (from the other battlefield games) into a game-mode selection that no US player would reliably be able to play -- that the game would be trounced in the press.
It was trounced in the press anyway, of course, because of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ Swedish developer that no one cared for, and "the game should have been given to a real developer", and so on. This eventually spawned "DICE LA", which is a "studio" that only did tweaking of config files, along with removing lag-thresholds and ping controls, making weapons less recoil-prone, and fire faster bullets, and things like that. Which then finally made the specific US customer that EA loved so much happy. The games, however, suck, as we all know. DICE, the actual studio, now no longer makes or tests the game - they only make the engine and the framework around it. Like a "toolset" for deployment of the game, so that the DICE LA "studio" can push a button and produce the product that gets released.
And this is how 16 players online has become an industry standard in shooting games. Where the actual engine - running on a middle of the road, single core PC from 2000 - could easily do 64 players in a similar engine. Ok? It's complete balderdash from start to finish that the engine croaks with such and such many players.
And the reason why 4 players were chosen to begin with - to really have that immediacy between the squad-members, so you see everything they do, where they aim, when they react, and so on - this has already been taken out of the game anyway. So as the quality of the game is online now - they could add so many players and there wouldn't be any difference. They'd have to account for the possibility of the amount of stratagems at the same time, and perhaps limit the calldowns when one player takes the gatling gun, or something, so not everyone can call in at the same time.
But you know that 8 stratagem strikes can be thrown into the game now without any real problems already, and that it is only on the ps5 where the scaler is broken anyway, that high amounts of gunfire or explosions are actually causing slowdowns.
.. but no - you guys know how things work, don't you! And 256 players at the same time in MAG, in 2008. Or Battlefield 1942 with 128 players in 2004 is just a myth. It didn't happen, obviously, because the hardware in 2025 can't f***n handle 8 players without lag.
God ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ damnit guys.