>>11977547
I really have to question how old you are and how old the houses you've been to are.

Modern rooms aren't that small, because houses are more open than they used to be, but everything was definitely smaller. Giant rooms for medium and small homes definitely weren't a thing until the 80s, maybe early 70s.

I grew up in California btw, so there was a giant boom in housing all the way until high school. So as i went from grade school, to middle school, and into HS, i also got to see all the new neighborhoods that kept on being created because i kept changing/gaining friends who lived in them.

Like cow pastures that i used pass on my way to a middle school dance, became gated communities with two story houses where an HS friend lived. A public golf course that sprang up that were surrounded by overpriced tiny houses had bigger living rooms than the upscale neighborhood that surrounded one of the oldest country clubs in CA.

And that's not to say there weren't big living rooms before, but they seemed rare and I never actually saw them used to watch TV.
There's a type of house that was probably popular in the 60s with a floorplan where you actually step down into the living room and there's "windows" in the walls surrounding it, like a fake courtyard but inside the house. I went to 4 houses like this and no one ever kept their TV inside this great room, because everyone used it as a place to entertain guests. Most times the TV was in an adjoining room, which basically looked like an oversized hallway thanks to the house's floor plan. So they sat maybe 6 feet away from the TV

... and now that i think about it, there's no good way to put cable into a courtyard room like that without looking ugly as fuck. So they couldn't put a TV in there. This could create a lot of viewing/TV placement problems if your house was constructed before cable TV became a thing.