The “exact” version they wanted was full of approximations too. They just didn’t have enough numerical literacy to understand how to say how much approximation they are ok with.

I guarantee nothing in anyone’s time accounting system is measured to double-precision accuracy. Or at least, I’ve never quite figured out the knack myself for stopping work within a particular 6 picosecond window.

Sure, but at the end of the day someone had to pay me an integer amount of cents. They wanted a total which was a normal dollar figure. But when you sum up 7.6 times whatever a whole lot, you might get a nice round number or you might get an irrational repeater.

What's notable is clearly no one had actually thought this through at a policy level - the answer was "excel goes brrrr" depending on how they want to add up and subtotal things.