Interesting, I stand corrected. In most of the fields I'm aware off one could easily work in 32bit without any issues.
I find the robotics example quite surprising in particular. I think the precision of most input sensors is less than 16bit so. If your inputs have this much noise on them how come you need so much precision your calculations?
The precision isn't uniform across a range of possible inputs. This means you need a higher bit depth, even though "you aren't really using it", just so you can establish a good base precision you are sure you are hitting at every range. The part where you are saying "most sensors" is doing a lot of leverage here.
