Why is vertical take-off restricted to lighter weight aircraft?
Essentially it comes down to supersonic rotor tips

With a plane, in theory you can make it pretty much as big as you like - as long as you have strong/light enough materials, and can keep adding power, an aeroplane design scales pretty well. Bigger wing = more lift. As long as you can make the wing bigger without it breaking, and as long as you can add enough power to overcome the extra drag, there aren't many fixed limits

With a helicopter, we're limited by the rotor tips: once they go supersonic, they cause a lot of problems.

So how does a helicopter produce lift? By using rotors to push air down within a kind of circle. To add more lift we can do (essentially) three things.


Make the rotor spin faster, so it pushes more air down in the circle it already uses. Obviously this makes the tips spin faster, so we can only do it to a certain extent. We've already hit this limit.
Make the rotor blades longer, so they push a bigger circle of air. Again, though, due to the nature of a circular blade, the outside of a blade is moving faster than the inside. For a certain rotor speed, there's a fixed limit to how large the blades can be. Again, we've already hit this limit
Add more blades, so there are more blades producing lift. This works to an extent (hence why smaller helicopters may have two rotor blades, but larger ones have 4, 5 or more. Again, though, this doesn't scale indefinitely - each rotor interferes with the next, you can't just keep adding more


There are other slight modifications we can make, such as the airfoil of the rotor, but they don't add significant gains

So, basically, we've hit the limit of what we can lift with a single rotor, The only real way to add more lift now is to add more rotors: doing that would be far less efficient than simply using an aeroplane.

Which brings me to the final point - helicopters are very inefficient and pretty slow... We simply don't need, except in a few niche circumstances, to carry more weight with them.