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The fourth power law indicates that a heavier vehicle that is 5x heavier per axle does more damage to the road in one day than one day than a lighter vehicle (1x) would do in a year travelling the same route every day.
So no, its not disproportionate or unfair to fee vehicles by weight. Japanese kei trucks aren't even very big so there's market solutions that exists. Plus there's an argument to be made that if you're only using a truck once a year its more effecient to rent it than buy it.
As for simplicity, you're right no plan is going to easily be both fair and simple. Where I live there's weigh stations along the highway that weigh big trucks and these capture out of state trucks. I'm sure a registration fee can be collected there, too for out of state vehicles, even at a day rate. You can also offer parking fee discounts for registered vehicles.
If you boil down to "why do we care about this" generally the answers ARE easier to come up with.
I was skeptical about your claims about weight having such an outsized effect, but it looks like there's merit. Seems like it's a super complex area of study, and we have observational data that gives us rules of thumb that transportation and pavement engineers use to estimate pavement damages over time. Thanks for bringing that up, I've learned stuff today!
I still don't think it's as simple as taxing trucks though. Registration is part of the solution, but so is gas/sales/tire/oil disposal taxes, weigh stations, tolls, parking fines, crush charges, etc etc etc.
There's a lot of things that would need to happen in order to effectively capture and recompense road damage in California, if that were a goal of the state. Unfortunately I have very little faith that California can do it - for all the good things about California, effective governance or municipal problem solving is not really on the list from what I've seen. It's a shame, because they really have the resources, it's just all such a mess.
Its so hard to get through to most people on traffic engineering. Induced demand, for instance, is a nightmare to explain to anyone.
Traffic engineering is possibly so unintuitive they should teach it in high school so people understand the hell common sense and intuition create when they are wrong.
Every time some politician creates some well meaning but misguided attempt to fix a traffic or parking problem it creates an avelanche of unintended consequences.