Emacs Microfeature

Do you want to display long lines, or do you want to add newlines to the file?

Generally, the former is only used occasionally for code (where wrapping by words isn't usually useful), and human language text uses the latter.

Agreed for a completely unconfigured emacs process. But the article mentions enabling word-wrap. (That's one possible point of confusion for some - he means a variable/mode/feature with the name of "word-wrap", not just a generic word wrapping behavior.) It seems that that feature still does the sensible thing up through version 30. And from what I can tell from the mailing list, word-wrap-whitespace is an enhancement of the default word-wrap behavior that allows you to define your own whitespace chars to trigger a wrap.

But from an outsider's perspective, I see how not having ANY whitespace-based word wrapping behavior enabled by default would be off-putting.