Many things like childcare, elder care, or healthcare have significantly changed over the last 150 years and now people have much less slack[0] to go back to the old ways.
Anyway I care little about the size of a government as it is the result of many perverse incentives (vetocracy, companies pushing for both deregulations and regulatory capture, late stage capitalism trying to make almost everyone poor and/or unstable) but the latest generation of attacks on the size of the government feel a lot like a Embrace Extend Extinguish on social safety nets so that predatory industries like healtcare insurance can better extract wealth from the lower classes