Ok, this is a little vague, because are you referring to digital or analog?

When I was a kid, everyone was shooting full frame, because, well 35mm was the de-facto standard for film. Although my first camera was a 110 format camera, which is a hair smaller than a 4/3 sensor today.

Even medium format and large format had pretty much the same amount of background blur and low-light performance, just at a higher resolution.

Now of course, it wasn't trendy to take portraits with only one eyelash in focus, but the vast majority of people even on FF don't do that. On my 50 1.4 (a lens made for film cameras, btw) if you want to take a picture with such an extreme amount of blur you need to have your subject quite close to you. And there is virtually no one with a lens faster than f/1.4 nowadays.

Film and processing cost money, and took from an hour or to days to get back, so people would set the aperture in a more reasonable range.

Meanwhile, my teenage daughter is over here taking - IMO - close-to-professional quality photographs using an Olympus E-PL2 and the kit lens, available all day long for $100. It’s all in the mind of the artist.

Amateur photographers can be almost as bad as watch snobs, and with little more purpose.