IPv4 was designed in 1981. The idea of every household in america having a computer in 1981 probably would have sounded insane. According to google there was only 213 hosts on the internet in 1981.

In early 00s my university in Poland had all computers at the campus connected to the internet with public IPs :) Thousands of computers - every lab, every room at dormitories and some for public use standing at the corridors at campus, all with unique public IPs cause they had so many :)

I think they had 19 bits of IP addresses available or sth crazy like that :) They were one of the institutions introducing internet in Poland back in 90s, so they had a huge portion of the addresses assigned and kept them.

Your argument can't be so strong as to imply that IPv4 should actually have used 24-bit addresses, though.