I disagree here. For this, a memo application, I think the metadata (date, length, name, etc) is the true content here you’d want to scan, not the actual wavefo

I disagree here. For this, a memo application, I think the metadata (date, length, name, etc) is the true content here you’d want to scan, not the actual waveform itself. There’s some content like images that should scale to full bleed just fine, but for something like a table row, as-narrow-as-sensible is better for usability even if there’s a lot of unused horizontal space, because there’s not advantage to making the eye scan across a wider distance. The same goes for the width of paragraph text in general. A paragraph stretched to full screen width is much harder to read than a paragraph wrapped at paperback book width. If wide paragraphs were better, books would have a different aspect ratio.