There's a 2% variation between the lowest and the biggest. Is there a need to know a precise word count, where 2% of margin of error is not acceptable? If there's not, there's no problem. The author doesn't attempt to define what a word is, so maybe all of these are correct for their own definition of word? Maybe the definition of what counts as a word is the boring problem that needs a solution, but it doesn't look boring or easy to me. You can't ask people to count correctly something that you haven't even defined.

Also, believing that complex problems are easy is not something only programmers do. I work currently a lot with Excel automation, and most people have no idea of what can be automated easily and what can't. I have some people coming that ask for automating a task they've never done manually and don't really know how to do precisely. I think that's the same mechanism of "overabstraction" that leads to people to say "WET instead of DRY" (Write Everything Twice instead of Don't Repeat Yourself).