It's not an argument for longer roads or can kicking? The thesis is stated at the top: with 9 bit bytes we'd avoid a couple of bad numerological coincidence (like that the number of Chinese characters is vague but plausibly around 50k, or the population of the earth is small integer billions). By avoiding the coincidences we'd avoid certain problems entirely. Unicode is growing but we're not discovering another Chinese! Not will world population ever hit 130B, at least as it looks now.

If you think there's some equally bad coincidence go ahead and tell me but no one has yet. I think I do a good job of that in the post. (Also it's amazing you and maybe everyone else assume I know nothing except what ChatGPT told me? There are no ads on the website, it's got my name face and job on it, etc. I stand by what I wrote.)

Perhaps I misinterpreted your reply? It sounded like you were saying "read better" in response to the ChatGPT part, not the can-kicking part.

...but I do agree about the can-kicking. Why not 4, or 10? You'd have different pros and cons with each.