Ah, wow, I read the article wrong all this time, thank you. I thought they meant "the maximum number of moves you can make to reach any chess position is 218", and I was wondering why the article made no sense to me.

It's conceivable that the maximum number of plies (half-moves) you need is 218. The best known lower bound on needed number of plies is 185 for "Harry Goldsteen's furthest position" https://timkr.home.xs4all.nl/chess2/diary.htm So perhaps the hardest-to-reach position manages to improve on that by an additional 33 plies.

The word 'available' inserted at the right spot would make all the difference in clarity here.

I thought the same, but no doubt pawn promotion rules dramatically increase the depth needed to reach certain positions.

Is that weird? I feel like it’s plausible though. Very rare to have chess games with more than 200 moves.

lol same here.

This is not so interesting then…