If anything: Decompressing tile data for a 32x32 pixel sprite takes more CPU power than for a 16x16 pixel sprite. Similarly, copying the decompressed tile data to VRAM takes four times as much vblank time.
@Revenant I think the myth might be related to posts like this
Standard game resolution: Most games were 256x224. Higher resolutions up to 512x448 were possible but since higher resolutions caused slowdown, flicker, and/or had increased limitations on layers and colors (due to memory bandwidth constraints)
Hires and interlace mode require more pixels, which incurs slowdown when loading these pixels into VRAM. Hires and 8-bit modes have fewer layers, which may cause an engine to have to fall back to software compositing (like
Bust-A-Move and
Zoop, which use 8-bit), which incurs slowdown. Interlace has flicker if the even and odd scanlines in an area noticeably differ in luminance, as the S-PPU has no GameCube-style blending of adjacent scanlines.