But playing tricks with the INT_MAX limit ignores(or, more accurately, spits in the face of) the fact that we want our computers to pretend to be idealized machines.

Floats aren’t real numbers but we treat them like the mathematical object that they model for most purposes.

Of course, being aware of the limits of our models are important, but abusing the tragic finitness of our models to “well actually” someone is generally not helpful.