Usually the planes were there first, though. Airports were built far away from population centers, but then the surrounding towns or cities expanded.
See https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-is-it-so-hard-to-...
My hometown is also an example of an airport built far form the city (in the 30s) only to have the city expand around it, but traffic has expanded massively since the early 00s (after the city expansions happened) with RyanAir traffic. Before that it was mostly a military airport with some limited regional passenger traffic.
As an additional point, the most noise isn't necessarily near the airport but sometimes dozens of kilometres from the airport. Sometimes this is because the airport changed flying routes due to noise complaints and/or expansions.
I get that it makes sense from a logistics point to keep airports close to people. But's incredibly disruptive to all the people who are impacted by frequent loud bursts of noise during landing & takeoff.