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Just to clarify, ANY paragraph split across a page boundary has a Widow and an Orphan. These are the names of the two parts no matter if it's a Brontė 50 line paragraph split into two equal parts. The reason to have white space is that if there is an isolated one line (or maybe two) some people can lose the context when they flip the page. They might check to see (on paper) if they flipped two pages, or have to turn back. So material on paper may set a minimum of two isolated lines (or even three), thus the default in kobo and many wordprocessors of two, which is thus the minimum number of widowed or orphaned lines.
If you have poor short term memory and/or find reading difficult, you might even want 3 or 4 rather than 2 and not 1, which is really the do nothing setting. Sometimes there may runs of pages where the paragraphs happen to end at the bottom of a page, so even with 3 you'd not get the big block of white space. With 3 or 4 the blank space will be more variable in size than with 2, where it will vary as not every page break splits a paragraph and not every split paragraph has too small a widow or orphan. A dangling line at the top of the next page will cause a bigger blank gap as the entire paragraph may move to the next page.
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