Remember there was a time when a lot of goods weren't sold pre-packaged? My mom used to send me to the grocery with instructions like "buy two hundred grams of sausage and three hundred grams of cheese" and would give me the bags to pack them. There weren't dozens of kinds of sausages or cheeses in the grocery, and the way they were sold was that the person manning the stand had to cut them to the size the customer asked for. Same with cookies, sweets, grains, fruits and vegetables. To buy cream you had to bring your own jar. Sugar? -- you had to come with your own bag.

Packaging was more expensive to manufacture and often made the product quite a bit more expensive overall. It was sometimes seen as a scam as in "packaged deal" where unrelated extra stuff was made a mandatory part of the purchase if you wanted to have the other part.

Seeing shrinkflation as a next step in packaging evolution, I think that the general direction can be described as quality of life decreasing as a result of laziness that could be met half-way with technology. The technology dropped the quality but at the same time freed more time to do other enjoyable things. Sometimes completely sealing the way back so that now even the other things aren't as enjoyable, there's no way of going back to the supermarkets where you could buy goods by weight.