The generous hypothesis, here, is that this is so they can automate the benchmarking itself. If that is true, then this is likely a result of the test authors being too clever for their own good and over-optimizing. If an LLM can't figure out on their own that "how many" is asking for a number, it has failed at a much more basic level.

You should be able to easily accept answers like "four" and "4" as equivalent, for example. I doubt there will be that many frontier models running against this test at any time, and a simple glance at the answers from any human should be enough to catch edge cases like this one.