While density may be part of it, my (admittedly: anecdotal) experience in splitting my time between Los Angeles and the nearby mountain communities over the last year is that LA broadband speed is consistently 5 times slower.
As the previous poster mentioned, wood would only be used for particularly large poster type, but (if I recall correctly) even at large scale the printing press does wear out the wood blocks more quickly than metal type; the good designs that you see in wood would anticipate that distortion without compromising legibility.
Wood type was also often very trendy, insofar that new designs that were bigger and bolder were developed and produced quickly — the aesthetic lifespan may not have been longer than the physical one.
Also called Lining Figures, this property is a lot more common than “duplexed” alphabetical glyphs — even if they are not the default, most text fonts now support them as an opentype feature.
Somewhat interestingly, there is a great deal of inconsistency in naming in the type design world — both in marketing features like this, but also down to terminology for specific parts of letters. I agree that it would be very useful, but for whatever reason it never seems forthcoming. My assumption has always been that type design is a fairly distributed discipline (at least amongst latin-alphabet-using countries), but remains niche, so there’s more or less only regional terminology without much consistency. (This is purely observational, so take from this what you will)