[asymptosis]

It's not about number of addresses available, it's about reflection of organization hierarchy in the octets. The 10.0.0.0/8 range is useful for breaking a distributed company's network up so each major office gets a 10.x.0.0/16, and each department a 10.x.y.0/24.

This is why 192.168.0.0/16 is often used for services like libvirtd, kubernetes and docker. And the use of the range by those services makes it even more unwieldy to try and put some other LAN in there.

You can work around these considerations if you want, but many people won't. When you're the network engineer responsible for designing a company's networks, you'll be wanting to keep things simple and robust. When you're called in at 3am on a Sunday because the network is down, you better hope your ability to recover doesn't require making a bunch of subnet calculations because you decided to try and use the pool of available IP addresses efficiently.