I find myself regularly using the needles with larger eyes for their size, I do cut my thread at a slant and sometimes use the white paper behind.
I have a needle threader on my machine, but I can only get it to work one time out of 4 so I do it the old fashioned way. I deliberately bend one of those little silver colored needle threaders and use them when the eye is too small.
These old eyes just don't work like they used to.