I do beg your pardon, it was Georgian not Victorian era when this nonsense was dreamed up for no reason other than preference for trying to cram Latin-esque cases into english.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-genuine-rule-dictates-the-use-of-less-or-fewer-cs25kv8s5

The very notion of a neat distinction between fewer and less according to whether the noun is countable or not is a myth. It was invented out of whole cloth by an ill- informed 18th-century pedant called Robert Baker in his book Reflections on the English Language (1770). He proposed this distinction not as a hard-and-fast rule of grammar, moreover, but as a tentative suggestion with caveats (“I should think . . . it appears to me . . . ”) that you won’t find in modern style guides.

The wiki article on it notes that

The Cambridge Guide to English Usage notes that the “pressure to substitute fewer for less seems to have developed out of all proportion to the ambiguity it may provide in noun phrases like less promising results”. It describes conformance with this pressure as a shibboleth and the choice “between the more formal fewer and the more spontaneous less” as a stylistic choice.

i.e. it is a shibboleth for saying “I am educated unlike you uncultured lot who use natural sounding language”