We also had lead in petrol back then - nice!
I can only recall this anecdotally, a friend's mum ran a diesel car and my mum explained why they had such a noisy thing. You could suffer from tinnitus for hours after getting out of what I believe was an early square shaped Golf (with diesel engine). Diesels back then had no clever electronics or fancy injection so it was a dirty fuel.
You will find plenty of people who will say they were the best diesels, because they would burn literally anything, you could put used oil from your frying pan in it and it would happily burn it without any problem. They were uncomplicated chunks of metal, so it's quite common for them to do a million miles without any significant problems. Of course they were dirty as hell, so it's a good thing we don't use cars like that anymore. The only legitimate use I can think of is people who go in off roaders to Africa or deep parts of siberia, where the fuel quality is absolutely horrible, so you can't have a modern diesel with a high pressure direct injection system - one spec of dirt in your fuel and your injectors get clogged.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/oil-and-...
Diesel has always been more expensive, but there have been a few times (2007) where the prices got close.
And that's just the cost of the fuel from the pump - it doesn't take into account MPG of the car or duty benefits for diesel car ownership.