It’s a constant symbolic reminder, and still a 10X scope increase.

If you want to be pedantic about making “the clock slightly longer”, you might as well say “I don’t see why they don’t write their dates out in base 62. Then they could make the clock shorter by writing wD instead of 2023”. The point is that everyone who sees “02023” can have a bit of an “oh shit” moment where they instantly understand what it means.