3/4" is a good compromise, but other widths close to that can work quite well.

If you use short strips and join them, then having a collection of strips of many different widths would limit your choices of strips to join together and you would have to keep them well organised. Having most of your strips around 3/4" and about 5% of them about half or two thirds that would be fairly convenient.

Yes, good point. That actually raises another question - I see some people source 17-foot boards. On the Kudzu site, he talks about the challenge of finding clear boards and how he solves for that by simply cutting out the knots and scarf-jointing. He's talking about stringers not strips, but I assume it'd be much the same? But anyway, I was thinking I'd probably need to work with shorter boards and scarfing them, but I was thinking of that as part of the "prepare the strips" step, after which I'd have a pile of long strips.

Now I'm wondering if you actually need to do that, though - I seem to recall someone saying you could just butt-joint shorter strips directly in place? Or am I making that up? You'd get a line, but I don't if that would be objectionable. In flooring, random-width, random-length is a feature not a bug, right?