This will make it easier for us in the future to modify the instruction selector to support having types that are legal for some instructions.
The vast majority of the AVR instruction set works on 8-bit integers, with only load/store instructions (with some exceptions) working on 16-bit. The instruction selector will currently assume that i16 is legal and not attempt to expand i16 ops into i8 ops.
Regardless of the possible AVR improvements, these enums are basically equivalent so this is a reasonable simplification in itself.