Even if it's fully seasoned.... remember wood fire depends on radiative feedback to the fuel source, with oxygen delivery, to maintain a self sustaining reaction. Pyrolysis (the liberation of gaseous volatiles from solid fuel) is an endothermic reaction. It depends on the exothermic heat from combustion, while the comubstion relies on the endothermic pyrolysis reaction to supply gaseous fuel.
Splits, even tightly stacked, burn at their air/fuel interface and provide each other radiative feedback as the combustion generates heat to drive the pyrolysis. Similarly, if you space your kindling too far apart when lighting the stove, the reaction won't self sustain because adjacent fuel doesn't get enough radiative feedback to propogate or maintain a flame. Remember, radiative power falls off/increases with a distance squared relationship. Halve the distance to the radiative source, and you quadruple the incident flux.
If you just wedge one big split in a stove that takes up the whole firebox, the fuel/air interface is only getting radiative feedback from itself, which is also losing heat to the stove walls. Sounds like you were into a situation where you didn't have the surface area burning to provide enough radiative feedback to maintain combustion... as the ambient room air continued to draw heat away from the fire through the stove walls, the fire eventually went below its critical heat release rate for sustained reaction.