I grew up in a shoes on house with sticky floors and too many dogs and cats, where children were to sit on the floor because furniture belonged to adults and pets. I had friends with enormous half renovated, half deralict houses whee you kept your wellies on because there were nails sticking out of some of the floor boards and who knows where an incontinent pet might have peed. Shoes on houses were always a bit cold not very homely.
On most of the farms people did take shoes off.
I live in a country where everyone automatically takes off shoes when they take off coats now, including primary school kids (who put on indoor shoes, they don't walk around in socks - primary school children still sit in the floor, so shoes on means sitting and putting hands on whatever anyone else has on their shoes) - I've previously lived in another totally different country on the other side of the world where the same is true and where shoes are removed even in traditional restaurants.
None of the shoes off countries I've lived in have had a culture of carpets in houses - you don't see carpets as commonly anywhere as you do in the UK. Bamboo matting, beautiful hard floors of various types, often underfloor heating yes, a few beautiful rugs usually, fitted carpets very rarely.
I've swapped, initially because "when in Rome" but now because the difference in quality of home life seems to me to correlate with remiving shoes - sitting or pottering about indoors with your "street shoes" (as they say here) on has the feel of not being "at home", being about to scuttle back out, perching, being slightly unsettled, uncomfortable - it's an unsatisfactory, cold state of affairs.
I keep my shoes on shoes on houses but my children have grown up in a country where shoes in in the house is pretty much like ridinging your bike in through the front door and sitting on the sofa in your coat - so they do struggle to remember not to automatically remove shoes. It's counter intuitive and feels like an insult to the host. That's probably why shoes off people struggle with keeping shoes on in some cases, though I'm teaching my cross cultural kids to take their queue from the hosts.
Obviously people are not rigid algorithm following robots and are capable of understanding that wheelchair users cannot remove their wheels and not expecting anything like that - it's deliberately obtuse to think that a wheelchair would present some kind of logic bomb meaning the end of all cultures where shoes off in homes is the norm.