Because decades ago, applications didn’t waste anywhere near the absurd amounts of screen real estate that they do now.

Look at how much you can fit onto a 1920x1080 display running Windows 2000 compared with a recent release of GNOME.

We also have decade of studies showing that one of the best ways to boost productivity is to give people more screen real estate. This was true in the 80s, it was true in the 90s, and it didn’t really seem to plateau until something like 5-6K displays. The only reason people didn’t use bigger displays back then was due to the cost — a friend’s dad ran a prints go in the 90s and he really benefited from a display big enough to fit a whole page legibly, but that and an 11x17 printer cost enough that he needed a small business loan to buy them. He could justify it on productivity grounds but most people just accepted the hit.

Approximately the same way we reconcile with centuries of scribes being productive with quills and velum?