No, that's not how it went. People were not stupid and lacking any foresight in the past. Constrained storage space has been a concern since Charles Babbage's analytical engine, that is since forever in computing. No one ever thought let's stop at 16 bit pointers or whatever and it will be enough for the rest of time. It's an engineering tradeoff to make the best of the technology available at the time. Pointer sizes are not just a number, they correspond to realities down to the electronics and physical design of your system. Longer pointers mean larger address bus, larger registers, more transistors on your chip that won't be available for something else. They are more wasteful if you don't actually have that much memory to address. It's incredibly naive to think today's standards were even a possibility decades ago.