Back in the early, early days, the game designer
was the graphic designer, who
also was the programmer. So, naturally, the game's rules and logic aligned closely with the processor's native types, memory layout, addressing, arithmetic capabilities, even cache size. Now we have different people doing different roles, and only one of them (the programmer)
might have an appreciation for the computer's limits and happy-paths. The game designers and artists? They might not even know what the CPU does or what a 32 bit word even means.
Today, I imagine we have conversations like this happening:
Game designer: We will have 300 different enemy types in the game.
Programmer: Things could be really, really faster if you could limit it to 256 types.
Game designer: ?????
That ????? is the sign of someone who is designing a computer program who doesn't understand the basics of computers.