I once skimmed Prohibition-era academic text that described US drinking culture of the pre-Prohibition period in detail. It was fairly disturbing, as you suggest—whiskey in serving sizes that would work better with beer, and things like that.
But even though Prohibition failed to stop people from drinking, it apparently _did_ disrupt the earlier drinking culture in many ways. So I would be careful about using pre-Prohibition behavior to make inferences about post-Prohibition behavior.
(I'd love to find that book again, but sadly the library which had it got rid of a substantial number of rarely-used older books at some point.)
It's that there's a shared history regarding alcohol consumption which is uniquely American in nature.
Prohibition is part of that unique experience, and very much a part of the explanation for the compression of the consumption distribution.
Apparently it was absolutely normal for everyone who could afford it to be drunk all of the time, from seamstresses to soldiers. I don't think our modern efficiency-conscious society can really understand what it was like back then.
Safe drinking water was a pain in the ass. So mild alcoholic drinks was the norm. That that'd give you a little buzz at best.
Very few people could have afforded to be truly shitfaced 24/7.
The US had a very particular set of economic conditions in respect of infrastructure quality, volume of arable land for corn production, and corn vs corn mash distillate transport costs.
The result? "[In the 1790s], the settlement of the so-called “corn belt” in the Midwest created large new supplies of corn, which was cheaper and more profitable to convert into whiskey than it was to transport great distances without spoiling. Thus, as Rorabaugh notes: “Western farmers could make no profit shipping corn overland to eastern markets, so they distilled corn into ‘liquid assets.’ By the 1820s, whiskey sold for twenty-five cents a gallon, making it cheaper than beer, wine, coffee, tea, or milk.”
https://www.pastemagazine.com/drink/alcohol-history/the-1800...
Given the price, Americans drank an absurdly, mind-bendingly large amount of booze. While not uniform, the US has a consistently different relationship with alcohol than most other countries as a result of the impact of these events and responses to them upon it's food culture.