As far as I'm aware, the actual reason for 4K stacks is that after the system has been up and running for some time getting "1 physically contiguous pages" becomes significantly easier than 2 which wouldn't be arbitrary.
If there are exactly two free pages in the system, the odds of them
being buddies (ie adjacent AND properly aligned) is quite small. The
available page pool has to grow quite a bit before the availability of
order-1 page pairs approaches 100%.
So if we fail to allocate an 8k stack when we could have allocated a
4k stack, we're almost certainly failing significantly prematurely.