[bowlofpetunias]

It's the lazy way of stopping users from cheating a minimum password length requirement.

To be fair, any other way would be lead to convoluted rules like "no consecutive spaces", "no leading/trailing spaces" or "spaces don't count towards the password length".

This is exactly why forcing users to use strong passwords is a shit idea in the first places. The rules either become ridiculously complicated or you disallow perfectly good passwords. There's no middle ground.