It can. Just set RLIMIT_STACK to something huge. Distros set it at 8mb by default. Take it up with them if you want the default to change for everyone.
I think I, and the parent commenter, are just pointing out how arbitrary the limit is. It can't hurt to question stuff like this every once in a while.
There's always a limit. People only complain when it actually limits them. Most open source people have never needed to glob tens of thousands of files. If you want to feel better, POSIX says the minimum permissible ARG_MAX is 4096, and with Windows ARG_MAX is only 32767 characters.
