The comment was about why CPUs still use byte addressing even today. And it's my belief that's due to incomparably wide proliferation of 8bit computers.

Even CPUs that were 32bit with a 16bit data bus, like the 68000 series, required the ability to read and write single bytes to support the wide range of 8bit I/O chips including UARTs, timers, floppy-disk controllers, video controllers that were common at the time. The 8bit bus was king for a long time.

The evolution of Intel CPUs started with 4-bits