That's funny, I wonder how nobody thought to challenge that.
In a team I was part of, we used the default in a popular Ruby linter, Reek. And it wasn't 10, it was 5.
The team treated that as puzzle-solving, and it was part of their culture to tackle those kinds of challenges. There was light hazing of newbies whenever the CI didn't pass because methods were too big. So, that's why at least in this case. There was no technical argument, just inertia.
Code quality was atrocious. Things that could be 10 lines were 30 or 40, and extremely stateful.
It's amazing to me how even smart people can be taken in by Harold Hill types. Can I get a job going around giving advice for $100k a pop? I promise to do better than that guy haha.