Yeah originally cylinder-head-sector sizing was used, but we soon realized that you could fit more sectors on the outer cylinders that fly by the read head fast

Yeah originally cylinder-head-sector sizing was used, but we soon realized that you could fit more sectors on the outer cylinders that fly by the read head faster than the inner ones (closer to constant linear velocity) and suddenly you didn't have a fixed "sectors per cylinder" and the system broke down, so the drives had to lie to the system. ATA/IDE was introduced in 1986 and a replacement for CHS wasn't introduced until 2002 when the 8 GB limit of the multiple of the fake CHS sizes became a problem.