But there is on a taxi way at an airport?
Yes. What's important is the relationship between the distance from Camera to Subject A (call that Da) and the distance from Camera to Subject B (call that Db). On a football field, there are 100 yd between the goal lines; each end zone is 10 yd deep; and there's maybe another 10yd worth of apron surrounding it. So, if the two subjects are on opposite goal lines, they're 100yd apart, but for an on-field photographer, the farthest he could be behind Subject A is 20yd. So Da is 20yd and Db is 120yd - that's a 6:1 difference, which means that in a photo, Subject A will appear 6x larger than Subject B.
Eyeballing some measurements from NYT's overhead pic, it looks like the camera is about 170'-180' from the front of the crowd. It's hard to know where in the building the camera is, so I'm assuming it's back of house center. This eyeballing also puts the port wingtip about 140' from the crowd and the exit door about 214' from the crowd.
If Subject A is at the front of the crowd and Subject B is at the airplane door, then Da is 180' and Db is 394', which is a 2.18:1 ratio. Somebody at the front of the crowd will look twice as large as somebody at the plane. You can see this when Harris steps out of the plane - she's quite a bit smaller than the people in the crowd.
But most of that doesn't really matter, because the picture you called out was taken before the ladder truck had moved next to the plane. Before it moved, it was much closer to the crowd.
You can see the ladder truck move at around 28:18 in the video to which I linked earlier and to which I'll link again. You can even see baldy if you look close.
After the truck starts to move, a SS agent (big black guy) walks behind it and then to the right of it. He takes about 35 steps to get to the base of the stairs, which puts the distance walked at somewhere around 100'. The stair truck itself is about 30' deep. So, in that photo, Baldy was at least 130' from the door, or no more than 85' from the front of the crowd. So if Da for somebody in the front row is 180', then Db to baldy is 265'. Worst case, Baldy should look no more than 32% smaller than the people at the front.
More than likely, he's even closer to the crowd than that, which would make any apparent differences even smaller.