What you have to understand about beer and its importance before the 20th century is that water everywhere and at all times was filthy - drinking water was playing Russian Roulette with your very life. The making of beer kills bacteria. Of course, as a side benefit, it also is somewhat intoxicating, which tends to make an otherwise crappy life seem not so bad.
Yep boiling the wort kills bacteria, viruses and even fungal ickies. Hops and even before that other herbs have some antiseptic quality so kept the ickies out of the beer.
Unfortunately cirrhosis takes a long time to manifest so there was no evolutionary pressure to breed it out of the human line. Beer for bfast, lunch and dinner and for any drinks in between must have contributed greatly to early death but did not effect the production of successful offspring.
Plus the making of beer allows the grain to survive the months before the next harvest.
Yeah, even the kids drank beer, but it was usually “small beer”, kind of like what you can buy in Utah.
Beer was currency on planet earth for many centuries