I worked at a print newspaper. They have target word counts not because it’s a great metric because that’s literally the amount of space they have for article o

I worked at a print newspaper. They have target word counts not because it’s a great metric because that’s literally the amount of space they have for article on the page. Same for magazines. There is a target number of pages in the issue. Any business that publishes in both print and online still has that constraint. Online daily newsletters are designed to take so many minutes to read, which is calculated directly from the word count. So word counts often have utility. Coding sometimes has space and memory constraints but often it works best to optimize for maintainable code, which might be shorter or longer depending on the case.