AC is easy to change the voltage of with 20th-century tech (though, to be fair, high-power 21st-century tech for DC amounts to “convert to AC, change that, filter it back” with some—crucial—improvements), so it works reasonably well over moderate distances at moderate power if you shift down as late as possible, but it’s absolutely awful for transporting large quantities of energy over long distances, because of the skin effect.

Essentially, thick round wires are useless for AC because the current gets expelled to a thin layer on the surface (determined by the frequency and the properties of the material, roughly independent of how much you were trying to cram in there), thus the resistance goes down as the radius rather than the cross-sectional area, and you end up using absolutely asinine amounts of (nowadays very expensive) copper or (kind of expensive) aluminium in high-voltage lines. (Using flat buses instead of wires does work, but then sharp edges mean you get a lot more current leaking into the air.)

If you don’t have high-power semiconductor components you can use to convert to AC and back in order to shift voltages or to just convert to AC to power industrial motors, you will have to grit your teeth and bear it—it seems that mechanical motor-generators are simply too unreliable. But for the last twenty or so years we’ve had them, and I understand that people are once again looking seriously at high-voltage DC. Of course, grids are huge and expensive, so it may be some time until implementations become widespread.

I don’t think any of this counts as an instance of worse is better, though,—it’s just that the ease of building alternators changed dramatically over the last few decades.