To answer this I'd like to provide a bit more context to that part of the tour. The quote you refer to comes from the section "Get answers to practical, detailed questions" and is under the part with the heading:
Not all questions work well in our format. Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers.
Questions that need improvement may be closed until someone fixes them.
The section you quoted then comes down to:
Don't ask about...
- [...]
- or any other question with too many possible answers or that would require an extremely long answer
Emphasis in the above quotes is mine.
This part of the tour seems to be trying to direct people away from asking questions that will be closed and the part you quoted is particularly trying to avoid Too Broad closures. The message there reads as:
Please edit the question to limit it to a specific problem with enough detail to identify an adequate answer. Avoid asking multiple distinct questions at once. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question.
Taking all this information together it would appear that the quote is trying to avoid questions that will generate essay/tutorial length answers as they are not really a good fit for the question and answer model we use here. To quote an example of this from the comments.
That's not a long answer. Extremely long answers mean things like essays, which can be several pages long. Or questions which as for infinite lists. These are too broad. For example, "How do the themes in the Lord of the Rings affect how each individual character in the fellowship progresses through the story?" One could probably write thousands of words on such a question, amongst others. These are not appropriate.
@Edlothiad
As you can see the above example would generate answers that could be extremely long, it probably has multiple correct answers and will most certainly generate discussion rather than answers.
On a side note I believe the tour is mostly a fixed template, where the mods and community managers can alter select bits of the text. So whilst it's likely been tailored for our community, some bits of it could still be the standard text.