When you are designing a very high throughput system you do often end up needing to trim bits from a transaction in order to fit an integral number into a page/packet/buffer or even a cache line.
Other kinds of code may not have these kinds of requirements in which case I agree that these kinds of limitations can be short sighted.
But that kind of decision is what I was talking about with respect to engineering.
All of mainstream computing should have 64 integers by now, 4 digit years, etc.