Yeah. Kahan was involved in the design of the 8087, so he’s always wanted to _have_ extended precision available. What he (and I, and most other numerical analysts) are opposed to is the fact that (a) language bindings historically had no mechanism to force rounding to float/double when necessary, and (b) compilers commonly spilled x87 intermediate results to the stack as doubles, leading to intermediate rounding that was extremely sensitive to optimization and subroutine calls, making debugging numerical issues harder than it should be.

Modern floating-point is much more reproducible than fixed-point, FWIW, since it has an actual standard that’s widely adopted, and these excess-precision issues do not apply to SSE or ARM FPUs.