Most of our mammal ancestors between us and dinosaur times had likely had extremely short lifespans as well, often shorter than the ancestors of modern songbirds.

> This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe.

There's no indication that this is what the OP meant. If the OP meant that, they'd be saying that birds evolved faster, not that they had an ancestor that evolved a very long time ago, which is a meaningless statement.

I agree one should interpret what people say charitably, but there's a difference between that and just pretending that someone made a totally different claim in order to make a nonsense statement seem less silly.