The 78 character recommendation was aimed at people still using 80 column terminal, but I think it did us all a favour. Most professionally typeset or formatted text has lines of around 40-80 characters. Long lines are harder to read.
The version on the website was already wrapped, but very badly. IMO gmail improved the layout a lot.
There has been no real limit to plain text line length since the MIME standards introduced content transfer encoding 30 years ago.
Incidentally, here's something I find funny, but quite annoying. In the text it says "Mirror, mirror, on the wall" which is a nearly literal translation of the Grimm version, and the version I grew-up with. This is often given as an example of the Mandala effect, with us misremembering "Magic mirror on the wall" from the Disney film (
for example). I've even seen it cited as evidence for information leaking through from a parallel universe.