Perhaps the physical limitations of accumulating goods and moving them in an ever more crowded geographical environment resulted in cost pressures to economize on size and space. Similarly, perhaps it was the prospect of increasing costs of processing ever larger quantities of physical resources that shifted producers toward downsized alternatives.
Remember, it was less than three decades ago that the Club of Rome issued its dire warnings about the prospects of running out of the physical resources that allegedly were necessary to support our standards of living.