I'm taking a course on Arduino Uno programming and on today's talk I heard that the const data is optimized by Arduino, so that it occupies less space than the actual data type (namely, a const int occupies less than an int).

If instead of int I use uint8_t, uint16_t etc. is the optimization still applied, or does using the 8 and 16 bit ints represent bad practice?

I'm taking a course on Arduino Uno programming and on today's talk I heard that the const data is optimized by Arduino, so that it occupies less space than the actual data type (namely, a const int occupies less than an int).

If instead of int I use const uint8_t, const uint16_t etc. is the optimization still applied, or does using the 8 and 16 bit ints represent bad practice?