I tend to agree, and I work in security.

In the early days we all shared computers. People would often stand behind you waiting to use it. It might even not have a screen, just a teletype, so there would be a hard copy of everything you entered. We probably didn't have account lockout controls either. Knowing the length of a password (which did not tend to be long) could be a critical bit of info to reduce a brute force attack.

Nowadays, not so much I think. And if you are paranoid about it, you can still set it back to the silent behaviour.