With those two extra clues, and the answer in front of me, I finally figured it out.
Some things we noticed:
There are about 50 1’s and 0’s scattered through the text, if you count the o’s as 0’s, and the l’s (and occasional I, which mysteriously uses the same symbol) as 1’s. None of those appear to convert to anything useful as binary codes. Ignore this.
There are an unusual number of double-letter pairs in the text. Ignore this.
Not counting those, there are 9 numbers, or 14 digits scattered throughout the text. Neither of those is readily divisible by 4, so I can’t see any obvious way for them to regularly translate directly into the 4 letters of the answer.
Progressive hints:
So you’ll have to translate them into something else, which will then be a clue to a 4-letter word.
Keep the digits together as numbers, don’t separate them.
With 9 numbers, you can’t really combine them in pairs, so each number must point to a thing; try counting things on this page.
7-11 is two words.
Counting words gets me “the more you take away the bigger I get”