Alternatively, you can consider how ancient our modern taps and valves look, and not in a bad way. Sometimes engineering problems get solved once and don't have a pressing need to be revisited.
Exactly. You can see this in all sorts of things. Sure an clean sheet design of a adjustable wrench or semi trailer coupling generic roller chain or whatever other 100yo item might net a few % improvement in some areas by no longer having to design to the manufacturing tech and material costs of 100 years ago but often times the ecosystem that standardization enables is worth more than a couple percent of improvement somewhere.
