But I also wonder if you were a kid back then. Everything seemed larger when we were small. I can look at the garage in my parents 50 year old house and realize that cars back then fit in the same spaces as cars now, and were roughly the same footprint as far as worrying about the exact position so that you could still open the door to get in or out of the parked car.
I've been in some of those older cars more recently and yeah, they're just big and feel very open—and, anyway, these cars' being common pre-dates my childhood; though, even my sporty late-90s high school sedan felt more open than newer cars, because it was, due to all those safety changes—better visibility, less of a feeling of the car's interior trying to crush in toward you—and it wasn't a spacious-interior car for the time.
[EDIT] And even with the added height, the view from a truck or SUV sucks compared to those old cars. The only modern car I've been in the comes half-way close is some model or other of Tesla, and even that wasn't terribly close. Modern windows are shorter (they start higher up the door), windshields more-angled (for less actual viewing angle), and pillars have gone from a thin strip to big ol' things that are far thicker, both width and depth. One feels far less closed-in in most old cars than in most modern cars.