> And OTH if you only require 16 bits integer width, there's not much point in picking a 32 bit integer type.

Some common architectures like x86 can suffer from an issue called partial register stalls. So from a performance perspective choosing a 32 bit integer can be better.

> The parent is completely right in the sense that for actually portable C code it was always better to use fixed-width integer types which were chosen for the problem to solve instead of target hardware capabilities.

You're confusing things. It's one thing to claim that either they never used a feature or they even have a personal preference to do things one way or another.

Another entirely different thing is to proclaim a programming language designed to target any conceivable CPU architecture somehow no longer needs to support basic cpu arch traits such as word size.

As I pointed out,there are still processors being sold today that do not support 32-bit ints. If you expect C to be able to target these architectures, obviously this feature is still a critical feature.

Also, people who maintain yesterday's systems that require non-32bit ints still need to work on them.

Chesterton's fence is still relevant. Why are we pretending that it's ok to mindlessly proclaim a feature is not requires because we don't understand why it was necessary to begin with?