If I remember correctly, stub articles use to be widely accepted (and common!) in the early days. I wonder if as time progressed and Wikipedia became more popular if there wasn’t some pressure (unconscious or not) to remove cruft; and stub articles were seen as such. Or that there were just more folks with a critical eye.
Looking at Category:All stub articles there’s still 2,025,510 stubs out of 5,323,000 articles! That was surprising.
