It's still not reached a point where you can just choose high resolutions with no drawbacks.
2048x1536 19" (135ppi) at up to 72Hz was common at reasonable prices in the late 90s if my memory is correct. Although OS scaling sucked and text looked weird due to the shadow mask at that size. 1600x1200 (105ppi) was the sweet spot for me. And actually in my first job in 2004 I had two 20" 1600x1200 (100ppi) LCDs that I recall were reasonably priced and they were nicer overall. This was around the time LCDs became the default choice. Then "HD" became a thing a couple of years later and you are right, for the next ten years virtually all monitors were "widescreen HD", which was 1280x720 if you fell for marketing of the lower-priced units or or 1920x1080 at best. Anything higher was very expensive.
In 2012 the retina macbooks came out and I got a 13(.3)" with 2560x1600 resolution (227ppi). This was the first time for me that LCDs were finally great. But you couldn't get a resolution like that in an external display. So at that time I mostly just didn't use external monitors until 2016 when suddenly 4K 27" (163ppi) became reasonably priced. So I used 2 of those for years and they were good enough but still left me wanting.
Now still to this day, 4K is the max for external monitors at reasonable prices at any size. About 2 years ago I got an M1 macbook and realized it only supported 1 external monitor. I felt like I needed to keep the real estate I was used to and anyway, with the pandemic and WFH, managing multiple monitors with multiple (work and personal) machines sucked. All I could really find at a reasonable price was 32"/4K and 49" ultrawide. I begrudgingly downgraded to a 49" 5120x1440 monitor (109ppi). I will admit that going from 60Hz to 120Hz was nicer than I expected.
So in 2023 my laptop screen is great and has been great for 10+ years but this was my story about how I am still using the same pixel density as I did 25 years ago.