i mean they were, if you got lucky.
If you were neurotypical; if you bought in to the local religious sect's particular flavour and embraced it wholeheartedly; if you followed the other local cults of sports fandoms; if you were lucky enough to either have family without their own trauma that didn't take it out on you OR decided to repress it in exactly the same way that they did and just simply passed it forward or didn't talk about it.
i don't know what the ratios are but a LOT of people fell through the cracks.
it's just that the birth rate was high enough to continue the population growth, and there were socially acceptable ways to ignore the inconvenient problems (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy)
it's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis - because in the past anyone outside of the norm who wasn't lucky to do one of the things above was simply ignored, beaten, or died.
now the stigma is gone and we're finding EXPLICIT paths to treatment, tolerance, and embracement of mental health, neuroatypical brains, spectrums, etc. Is there overpathologizing? Maybe? Hard to know! The stigmas still aren't gone. Go read the comments on any video providing tips on how to parent children on the spectrum and see neurotypicals freaking out about how soft the current generation is.
the western world seems to have peaked in tolerance in the 2010s, and is now backsliding into authoritarianism and fascism. that's trying to recreate a lot of those original support systems (by destroying the new ones). It's a bold plan, let's see how it happens.
The people who, according to your theory, want to reverse the tolerance trend and slide towards fascism/authoritarianism didn't pop out today. They existed and lived in society in the 2010s too. So, from a logical standpoint, what changed?
The media apparatus in America has split into a center and left, and then a right wing which has different norms and produces its own products.
That in turn has created a durable political coalition that self referentially calls itself when it needs to support its descriptions on reality.
It’s significantly more effective at producing narratives, and moving ideas from the fringes to the main stream news channels.
Since it has little traffic with the left and center media channels, it avoids counter claims and norms on journalistic standards.
So you can now primary Bipartisan politicians, and then the ideas that gain media attention are the ones that reinforces party talking points. Counter views simply do not get air time.
What we are seeing today, is the progression of those forces, as the narratives are never challenged.