Roasting vegetables only became a (semi) widespread thing in the '90s. It sounds stupid but before the '80s the idea of chucking broccoli in a stove pan or oven just wasn’t part of the Western home cooking canon - that was reserved for meat.

I definitely remember that was still the norm for my GenX parents in the 2000s and they only started properly roasting vegetables on occasion in the 2010s. Though at least they’d use generous amounts of sauce so we always enjoyed our vegetables.