Even when I was a kid they were starting to understand this. I'm old enough to remember people believing it was useless, maybe even I was told it from a figure of authority at some point, but definitely as a child my memory was "people used to think it was useless, but now we know it isn't ".

It's kind if interesting to me that I continually see stories titled like the article over the years. It goes to show that undoing incorrect common knowledge is a long process that isn't really ever completed, because an editor somewhere decided that a title like this would grab people's attention, but to someone like me, this is like a headline that reads "brushing your teeth confirmed to be effective treatment in fighting tooth decay".

I've noticed a surge in articles letting me know that the appendix isn't useless, so I assume we figured out a bit better what it actually does, but to me the most interesting part is about knowledge dissemination.