Can you imagine the argument for 8bit bytes if we still lived in the original 6bit world of the 1950s?

A big part of the move to 8bit systems was that it allowed expanded text systems with letter casing, punctuation and various ASCII stuff.

We could move to the world of Fortran 36bit if really needed and solve all these problems while introducing a problem called Fortran.

There was already more than enough space for characters with 12-bit systems like the PDP-8. If anything, the convergence on 8-bit words just made it more efficient to use 7-bit codepages like ASCII.