Most of the contributions I have made as examples or in the wiki, have been the outcome of days of struggling to understand how to do things. I suspect that is also true for much of the older contributions from many contributors whose main career path was not as a programmer, but as an engineer or whatever.
When I saw your mention of Define, it was the first time that I remember seeing it. On the other hand, the LCL is becoming so good that I now rarely use conditional compilation statements.
This example code was taken from a project that compiled in 32bit Windows and 64bit Windows and Linux, which was a quite usual combination when it was written. Strangely, it compiled correctly for each with that conditional code, but not without it. 8 and 16 bit versions of any kind were simply not required and therefore irrelevant in the original context. If someone required that, surely a completely exhaustive example was not necessary because enough was given to provide an understanding.
var
MyFilesize:
{$ifdef Win32}
Cardinal
{$else}
int64
{$endif}
It is great to see things improving. Perhaps you could give a full example for comparison, but would the irrelevant parts not be removed by most programmers?