Some ditherers take REALLY long on larger images. With this limit it's less likely people select a ditherer and then everything freezes for a very long time.
It is not a great solution. In the future I want that users can cancel dithers that take forever. Then, in theory, users can load larger images. If they don't want to wait for dithering their 16k image, then they could just cancel the process.
So yeah, this limitation may not be there in the future.