There's a non-zero chance that it was around 30 pieces and we felt it like 100. Our quick testing the game for the jam was not very scientific. I just changed it to "~30"

Well it's a good thing you exuded such a confident number in the article to make your point when you very well knew it was completely made up. Definitely gives the reader confidence that the rest of the article is completely true!

This is a ~400 word blog about tetris, not a research paper about curing cancer. Maybe some slack can be afforded?

Unless they weren't seeding their RNG, which means every game could be the same.

PICO-8 initializes it for you upon loading the game