That was the old landlines, of actual POTS, era. Back then, there was a direct electrical circuit literally switched using relays between both participants in a call, with only amplifiers, switches and power sources in between. More modern systems used banks of relays, and then it all went downhill quality-wise.
First, the telco core systems were replaced with digital trunks that had ADCs on both ends of a call in the regional distribution center, and consumers were switched over to ISDN for telephony. Then, the analog/ISDN frontends moved to the curb side where ADSL, VDSL and nowadays G.fast frontends were added to the mix, which were connected to the telco network using fiber. Then, analog and ISDN were shut down, with voice phone calls being migrated to VoIP.
And nowadays, it's the full evolution with GPON - on the telco side, there's only fibers and a single TX/RX pair of transmission modules serving up to 64 customers. What used to require a whole multi-story building can now be done in the space of a better-quality shed. And the analog frontend is only at the CPE, if there is an analog frontend present at all and it's not VoIP softphones or DECT.