Was the adoption of conventional tailplanes as 'everyday aircraft' inevitable, or are there other designs that can be just as good?
If you write an optimizer which modifies the wing spans of a virtual aircraft, you will end up with a big wing in the middle and a smaller one at the tail if your goal was to achieve good performance, a wide cg range and docile behavior. So yes, a concurrent evolution would also result in a conventional layout.

Why no canard?


The forward wing is more highly loaded for stability. Adding control surfaces there would reduce the possible control effectiveness. Putting them at the large rear wing will result in higher stick forces and higher lift changes for the same pitch moment changes.
For the same reason, the wing cannot utilize its full lift potential because the canard has to stall first.
Since the wingspan of the canard is smaller than that of the wing, the wake of the canard will hit the wing and disturb the lift distribution over span there.
For directional stability a tail is still needed, even though it is only used for vertical surfaces. Alternatively, the canard wing can be swept and winglets be used for directional stability, but adding sweep will reduce the efficiency of the wing.


This all puts the canard at a distinct disadvantage. It works, but comes at a price.

Why no flying wing?


Flying wings have low pitch damping and a very limited center of gravity range.
They often cannot have trailing edge flaps for extra lift during slow flight, so their take-off and landing speeds are higher than those of a comparable tailed aircraft. Or the wing loading has to be made lower, which hurts at high speed.
Even though a good flying wing design has sweptback wings, they are poorly suited to high transonic speeds. Their wing airfoils cannot have rear loading, so the critical Mach number at the same lift coefficient is much lower than for conventional configurations.