When the standard airline cabin was designed (the 707 in the early 1950s), flights were about 63% full. Now they're about 84% full. So the cabin you're flying in now has less than half as much empty space as its designers expected.
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I'm sure they did, but they probably expected it to happen the way it had in the preceding decades: more planes, not more people per plane.
And their expectations were right, till deregulation came along more than two decades later, and changed everything.
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I guess they expected both things—more planes and more people per plane. The latter would kick in as flights became accessible to the hoi polloi. Some people in my parents' generation used to complain that "flying is no longer glamorous."
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Thus it would make sense to design cabins with slack capacity. Back then airlines were a growth industry.
End of conversation
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