Looks to me like the only assumptions made were in the form of ad-hoc heuristics.
But in this case, the problem is small enough to make entropy maximization computationally tractable: it only takes a couple of minutes to crunch on Aspell’s english word list (5238 words of 5 lowercase letters).
Amusingly, the best starting word for french wordle is RAIES (rays, but also slang for butt cracks)
