With P+ surrounding a tiny emitter, for some increase in WE
you might increase Rb. But beyond that I still contend that you
will see Rb come back down, hugely, as the problem decomposes
from the circular-inward to a pair of slab W/L pinched base
resistances (moving from an annular to a dual-base layout
essentially). If your groundrules constrain you to only small
WE, this might look like a straight line, increasing, but I am sure
if you went to (say) WE=20um, LE=1.2um you would have
passed through an inflection.
Maybe we just live in different worlds. When I was doing bipolar
IC design I was interested in amperes and tens of volts. The
emitter they show, is smaller than the contacts I used to use.