It's a good story but I think you oversell it. Carbolic Smoke Ball was heard in 1892, peppercorn rents (literal and figurative) predate that case by hundreds of years.
Also this models what we were discussing. What exactly the rules were for contracts drifted over time as people's intuitions and experiences changed, things that everybody just accepted as normal in 1825 seem insane in 2025 - when I was born there wasn't yet an Unfair Contract Terms Act for example - if you didn't read carefully maybe you're trapped in a deal that any fool could see was abusive, but the courts can't fix it.
For example I'm glad the Unfair Contract Terms Act (and its successors exist), but I would have considered it a formalisation of existing, inconsistently applied, principles. As I see it, the magic of common law is that actual decisions can depend on which way the wind is blowing at the time, while keeping vague long-term ideals.
The concept clearly had some support in the Doctrine of Fundamental Breach. Perhaps you were already born in time for e.g. Canada Steamship Lines Ltd v The King (1952) which limited the ability to include exclusions for liability in a contract, in a way that that wasn't codified until the Unfair Contracts Terms Act.
Anyway I think we don't substantially disagree, and I think it's valuable to have a range of reasonable conceptualizations of the same history.