> Every default malloc implementation worked this way about 12 years ago.

Perhaps "default" is doing the heavy lifting here. Glibc malloc was quite bad for a long time, true. But TCmalloc / jemalloc are 21-22 years old, respectively, and jemalloc has been the FreeBSD (released) default malloc implementation for the last 18.

> The solution is and always has been to make larger allocations and use those efficiently.

Having a not-dogshit allocator really doesn't hurt. There's no reason to defend shitty allocator + every application doing manual memory pools on top of it to paper over the bad allocator.