[Dylan16807]

> It’s simpler than doing a limit on number of states

According to who?

A counter that you ++ each move sounds a lot easier to me than throwing off a separate thread/callback to handle a timer.

> Doing a time limit also enforces bot moving in a reasonable time.

It's designed for specific hardware, and will never have to run on anything significantly slower, but might have to run on things significantly faster. It doesn't need a time cutoff that would only matter in weird circumstances and make it do a weirdly bad move. It needs to be ready for the future.

> It puts a nice limit to set up a compromise between speed and difficulty.

Both methods have that compromise, but using time is way more volatile.