[maigret]

The main argument for me, additionally to what you describe, is keeping lines readable. There is a reason the books from 1000 years ago were made vertical. They could have used much more width and characters per line but they didn't. See the newspaper format as well with multiple columns. The eye struggle to follow a text that is too wide.

For me, 80 chars is an arbitrary but acceptable limit (I could even argue it should be even shorter).

Personally, I view verbose languages that needs longer line as bugs. If you look at Scheme for example, it lets you wonderfully indent and nest, so that you rarely need long lines. Everyone benefits from it. Shorter lines are better for the brain, the problem is when coding languages make line too long by design, forgetting the 1000 years of experience in typography we've accumulated.