Are we still taking the snippets Google lets out as absolute gospel? I'm not saying John's not wrong here. I've seen websites with very little content rank. But having content is good for SEO. Having more content means you're likely to be considering SEO in general. You're probably building links, producing blogs etc. With more content, you'll rank for more phrases, more phrases potentially means lower bounce rates, more traffic, more social media sharing more rankings etc. So it might not be direct but more words (as long as they're good) is good for your SEO