I heard something recently that could be interesting and/or significant about the old fairway gang mowers that created the single up and back (light and dark) cut that can be seen on the old aerials and is a look that's starting to make a return today (Shinnecock, Salem etc.) although obviously done today with much smaller machinery.
I'm not certain how wide those old gang mowers were in feet but they definitely were wide! I also heard that they needed significant space to turn (maybe up to 30ft) and that could have affected the fairway cut and width approaching greens and such--certainly since they could not reverse them.
Today plenty of design decisions are maintenance driven and it seems logical to assume the same might have been true in the days of the old fairway gang mowers.
We do know that there're many reasons that fairways shrunk following WW2 but the replacement of the old gang mowers with smaller more manueverable machinery might have had something to do with that particularly into green appoaches (as was explained to me recently).
Certainly many of the fairway green approaches have shrunken significantly at my course and my feeling is that ground should be in fairway (or chipping area) if it's interesting ground for golf as fairway!
There was a good topic on here recently about "design intent" and how one can or can't figure out what that may have been in detail. This may be another example of how difficult it may be to figure out.
Were wide approaches a function of design to accomodate the ground game or a function of maintenance necessities (turning the wide gang mowers) or maybe some combination of both?