What makes your lived experience more correct than the lived experience of my grandparents and parents who lived in the time?

Once the telephone was popular in the US this was something that people in our circle just stopped doing. All it took was a 30 second phone call to say "hey, can if I head over if you're not busy?" (and the answer was almost always yes, I'll agree that is likely different than today) to make sure, so that was considered the polite thing to do in our working class semi-rural midwest circle.

If you're living truly in a rural area where you're sharing a party line with others and the nearest place is over a mile away then yes, I'll concede, that was probably much more normal.