I mostly play baroque music from notation, where the convention was to use roughly doubled note values compared to today - most of what I play has the beat in m

I mostly play baroque music from notation, where the convention was to use roughly doubled note values compared to today - most of what I play has the beat in minim/half-note sized values, so we're often in 4/2 or 6/4 rather than 4/4 or 6/8. The lack of visual noise from the sparser notation, hollow note-heads etc. is rather pleasing compared to some later music where you're into demisemiquavers where you could have just had semiquavers. We see semiquavers in my viol consort we know they're going to be teeny little notes in most pieces. There's just less ink on our pages! I don't really understand why it shifted to shorter values. I guess it probably wasn't deliberate though. These things usually aren't, they just... happen. ETA: maybe the increased visual grouping of beamed quavers and smaller notes was considered valuable for conveying the composer's intentions with regard to phrasing, especially as printing technology became increasingly capable of properly reproducing them.