Long Beach and the scale of later destroyer leaders

How would a roughly 21,000-ton Long Beach affect the size of later US nuclear cruisers?

Later ships would also tend to grow, although many were designed as destroyer leaders and only later called cruisers.

A larger Long Beach belongs to a counterfactual in which warships generally grow. Later American designs would be expected to scale upward too. Several ships eventually called cruisers were originally destroyer leaders, which is a separate design starting point. Their later classification does not erase that distinction.