Yeesh. How would you ... rename anything? Imagine a linter rule which prevents referencing a given name on more than 5 different lines of code.
Which is why I don't have such a rule and would oppose it.
It's just not really practical for actually building software.
Please tell us more. Did 6 line commits get rejected? How did anything get done?
The rule wasn't hard and fast, but you had to have a damn good reason why you wanted to add bigger commits. Protobuf definitions didn't count, so you could get away with doing longer commits for those.
Tests were discouraged anyway ("Google just tests in production", we were told), so there wasn't a lot of that sort of thing.
well that sadly explains a ton of little quirks Ive seen in all sorts of google software over the years. Chromecasting functions is especially egrigious and it feels like connecting/disconnecting does a different thing each time.
...or satire?
Post-arrival, I was ordered to rewrite a working, stable PHP web app into Go ("Google doesn't use PHP, because it doesn't scale"). We weren't allowed to write RESTful APIs any more, everything had to use Protobuf.
And there was a physical fight in the office one day between two of the developers, that culminated in one of them storming out and never coming back.
I'd already left by that point, after a heated conversation in which I was told "you're not half as good a software engineer as you think you are". Well, duh.
Amusingly, the PHP app is still running, still working.
This led to a complete loss of all context; without that overview, you might very well be releasing code faster, but it could be the wrong solution to the original problem - and crucially, you won't know until it's out in the wild.
A preference for smaller, more focused PRs is fine - it certainly makes them easier to review independently - but I think putting any sort of limit on the size makes your team more likely to omit things like tests and also to not have sufficient context to understand the overall problem space.