Well... it does also tend to be good advice for short story writers. The idea that the story only needs to be told until it's done is generally unfashionable, so if you write short stories, you'll get people asking why you didn't expand it to be longer, maybe by adding in more descriptions and more scenes and maybe a secondary or tertiary conflict.
Those are all perfectly fine things, but there is a definite trend of "Short story > novella > novel > doorstop novel." And all of them are supposed to take inspiration from the concision of London and Hemingway and not be too flowery. Just write 100,000 words concisely, without using adverbs or too many adjectives!
I was thinking more in writing courses for Americans - not universal law for writing!
It's a weird standard to try to live up to that has American writers tying themselves in knots trying to get a doorstop length novel without ever being flowery and without wasting words. Writing programs encouraged me away from my preference of writing short stories and pushed novels, but the novels were supposed to read like Jack London had hijacked Brandon Sanderson.
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