“Never before have we had so many choices in beer.”?
Not true.
Look around the turn of the 1800 to 1900 and there were 1000’s of small breweries and NO Bud worrying about its market share.
Yes, but they were primarily local, with little means for distribution. So you had to travel around the country to taste them, and travel itself was much more difficult in those days. So people basically settled for the few beers that were available in their local area. Having hundreds of choices at a single point of sale was unthinkable at the time.