> I guess it just works out to be conveniently 'about right'
There's a reason.
The ideal DCR for most PTs and OTs is *zero*.
But zero Ohm wire is always out of stock.
We gotta buy stuff with Ohms in it.
And the lower the Ohms the higher the price (and bulk).
How many ohms can we get away with?
Say you had a 6V 6A heater load. 6V/6A= 1 Ohm. Say you used a wire that wound-out to 1 Ohm at 6V while delivering 6A. There's obviously 6V*6A= 36 Watts of heat in the transformer, HOT; and 50% efficiency. Undesirable.
It works out, for a wide range of transformers (50Hz-100Hz, 10V-250V, 10W-100W) that you can probably work out a design with DCR about 5%-10% of load resistance/impedance, with reasonable cost.
That SilverTone OT is probably 4K primary? And marked for 170 Ohms DCR. 170/4000 is 0.04 or 4%. A bit low but in-sight of the usual 5%-10% goal.
There's major exceptions which make this a very un-certain "rule".
The 4K winding is thousands of turns of fine wire. It breaks. To reduce rejects the designer may choose to up-size the plate winding wire size.
OTOH high voltage windings need a lot of insulation, which tends to reduce the wire-size that can fit.
The low voltage (heater, speaker) windings are a *few* turns of *fat* wire. This tends to get lumpy. Which endangers the fine-wire windings. The designer will fiddle the wire size to get full-width layers of a not-too-fat gauge. For some reason it is much more common to down-size speaker windings even if the DCR goes past 10%.
And "extra" windings can be oddballs. We see there a 110V 100W winding with 3.7 Ohms and a bias winding which seems to be 24V at less than 1 Watt, also with 3.7 Ohms. If they used the same gauge for both, the 24V should be 0.8 Ohms. But since the bias is less than 1mA, they could use a gauge 1000 times smaller, for 800 Ohms. Since it feeds a 100K resistor that would work fine. But that might be too small to wind. It seems they simply used the same spool as used for the 84VAC windings (quad-stacked to 480VDC) so they only had 3, not 4, supply spools to stock and keep straight on the winder.