I'd argue that position is less of a factor with pocket pairs than with most implied odds hands. That's directly related to the fact that they hit so much more often.

As you point out, you need to make ~8x your preflop investment from postflop play. Assuming pot sized bets (I know it's unreasonable, but go with it for now): We know the preflop pot is over 2x our investment. One street of betting is another 2x. Add our call and the pot is now 6x. If villain bets another street, we got the amount we needed (without even raising)!

Certainly the added chips we get over three streets and from raising accounts for more than what we lose in our opponent betting less than pot.

Because we basically only need 2 bets to enter the pot, it's not entirely difficult to make that happen even from OOP. Certainly it helps to be in position, but it's not really necessary.