Please use Google street view in any small town around the world and notice the prevalence of foot traffic. Even on roads with no shoulder, bike lane, sidewalk or similar. I've walked to school since I was 6 on roads not too dissimilar.

No, use the one for Mineral Bluffs:

1. Study the width of the oversize vehicle here[1].

2. Study the lack of shoulder next to this guard rail[2].

No parent in their right mind is going to be comfortable letting a six year-old walk that, in any decade. And no municipality is going to let school buses drop kids at arbitrary parts of that highway, unless the driver is dumping them into a residential side-street.

I'm glad you survived walking on streets like this when you were six, but that's not relevant to these highways being dangerous places for regular (or irregular) foot traffic.

1: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.9150284,-84.2767414,3a,75y,2...

2: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.91672,-84.2760891,3a,75y,317...

That would definitely not been unusual in Germany in the 80s. Actually many rural German roads didn't even have that small shoulder, you really had to walk either on the street or on the grass. Kids learned how to handle this. There are even popular children's songs from that decade about how to do this, which is to walk on the left side of the road (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La129TFxCGE).

Nor in the US in the 90s. I don't know where this kid was, but we'd walk in the grass on the other side of the ditch, not practically on the street.

I had to recheck those to make sure my Maps app wasn't loading the wrong thing.

Those appear to be normal streets like those kids all over the world walk on the side of?

Gonna have to disagree with you. Most car-centric (even small) towns I have seen do NOT have a prevalence of foot traffic.