I don't think the previous user is saying that no-one cared about space, just that no-one cared about 2038. So that conversation wouldn't have happened anyway.
Indeed. There was no carefully considered trade-off made between storage space and brokenness in 70 years time. Nobody thought like that. Nobody would have expected their code and data to be remotely relevant that far into the future. People wrote code according to present-day norms which would have included using a 32-bit integer for time.
