> Customers have no way of knowing they would be getting a better product or extra 25 millimeters of leg room if they paid 3% more.

If you search on Google Flights, the seat pitch is clearly displayed, or you can use third party tools like Seatmaps.

But many people use airline sites directly, don't understand or care, or as the article correctly asserts, care more about the price than anything else.

Even if the information is technically available, a business can sit there optimising for a specific problem while individuals have to deal with tens or hundreds of separate problems every day. We have to satisfice and finer details like this are usually ignored.

Not everyone needs extra space and for those who do the hourly rate for being in mild discomfort on an airline is huge.

It’s less that most people don’t care instead it’s often a completely reasonable tradeoff.