I disagree with their criteria that they couple with it, but I could come up with some of my own that I'd like better.

"This has 900 lines but 850 of them are in codegen boilerplate that changed", for instance.

"This has 900 lines but they're mostly updating a bunch of test fixtures along common patterns."

"This is 800 lines because we bumped ten version dependencies and that bumped a lot of other things + they changed the package naming for some so we had to rewrite a bunch of imports."

"I added two panels to a Grafana dashboard." (ok slight exaggeration)

Of course it's relevant: your statement is a strawman ... they didn't claim that 1000 lines is a small change, that was part of a conjunction. Basic logic here.

I won't respond further.

I did bother to read it (and that ad hominem charge is an explicit violation of the HN guidelines) and you're mischaracterizing it. In any case they did not say that 1000 lines is a small change.

I won't respond further.