I worked in non-profit funding for many a year, and in the more traditional charity space, there's zero -- even negative -- correlation between grant value and effort.

It's also not just about the initial (typically multi-stage) application, but then the reporting and compliance requirements, the random donor requests.

This sort of thing is often objectively worse for smaller funders, but also relatively worse with smaller amounts of money as it's harder to resource for people to deal with the crap. Grant money ain't free.