I actually had Apple's chips in mind when talking about "most shipping processors" because they have historically invested heavily in their caches and reaped benefits from it. But not all the world's an M1, and also I'll have you know that Apple themselves cares very much about their code size, even with their large caches. Don't go wasting it for no reason!

(I should also note that I am pretty on board with you with regards to variable-length instructions, this is just independent of that.)