Yeah, a single `body { max-width: 50em }` is not going to change any of that, and actually makes it more accessible to a wider audience. The entire point of typography and formatting is to make text more accessible. Lack of layout is the antithesis of that.

Then there's the separate issue of overlong paragraphs, which is simply a sign of poor writing (again making the text less accessible), unless you're trying to argue that the use of fewer <p> tags makes the page faster to load and render?

Now, I do wish that browsers had saner default styles, so one wouldn't need even that single line of CSS, but that's not the world we live in, and for whatever backwards-compatibility reason we're stuck with how things were in 1995.