Agreed; I just didn't want to continue arguing with myself and post a counterpoint to the counterpoint; glad others are doing it :-) (Actually I posted a comment along the same lines in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22409822) BTW one of the features of WEB is/was that it allows arbitrary-length macro names, which mitigates against the Pascal requirement that only the first 8 letters of identifiers count: https://texdoc.net/pkg/webman)
He also used six-character identifiers. He had to. TeX and Metafont were intended to be compiled by lowest common denominator Pascal compilers. Modules, etc., were all vendor specific extensions at the time.
One might consider that to be good engineering.
"If you cut across the Saturn-B moon rocket, you find only an external skin which is at the same time a structural component and the tank wall."
Soda cans and plastic water bottles are the same; it's how they are cheap enough to be fit for for purpose.