Was katakana more common in the past?


The reason I'm asking is because I was reading this New York Times article:
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/magazine/korea-japanese-occupation-
surrender-ww2.html> and in the article, there was a picture of a Japanese
instructor teaching Koreans how to write in Japanese.This
picture:[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/09/06/multimedia/27ww2-korea-03/merlin_176164095_e433a392-9aa3-427b-81aa-496411431e9c-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/09/06/multimedia/27ww2-korea-03/merlin_176164095_e433a392-9aa3-427b-81aa-496411431e9c-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp)

The thing I noticed about this is that they were being taught entirely in
katakana, far different than when I was in classes learning hiragana instead.
This made me wonder if katakana was actually more widely used back then, or at
least if it served a specific purpose (a historical reason) that could explain
why they weren't using hiragana.

