I think we’re looking at a perfect storm of “online shopping has hollowed out RL retail and has now decided to stop giving away freebies now that there is little alternative,” and “we have a lot more people with bigger bodies that are just inherently hard to fit.”
A group of slim people all tend to have “relatively” similar bodies, other than height; a group of plus-size people will vary much, much more, because people vary so much in terms of where they store the extra fat. Some women store it in their busts, some round the stomach, some in the thighs, some women’s breasts droop lower than others….This makes it far, far harder to just look at numbers on a webpage and be confident it’s going to fit you.
Clothes-making has the same issue! On these threads, someone always comes up saying “We’ll all just have to start making our own clothes instead,” but unless you are skilled enough to draft your own patterns, plus size sewists and knitters face the same problem because they struggle to find patterns that really fit them! I am a knitter and on American forums in particular where most women are overweight, it’s constant argument; the knitters and sewists complain that the pattern writers are leaving them out or that the plus size patterns do not fit them anyway; the pattern writers retort that “I only have so much time to draft patterns and it’s really hard; trying to cover EVERY permutation of the human body is impossible, and even trying to do this would mean we’ll all have to either accept a drastically reduced range of pattern choice or pay a LOT more for our patterns…”
I suppose that sewists DO have the advantage of being able to adjust things if they have any skill at all, and to be honest I think this is probably the best way forward for many women who are struggling with these issues; order from companies with sizing you know from experience and order slightly on the larger size, then adjust it yourself or find a dressmaking service that is prepared to do some pinning and taking-in in the necessary areas to make it fit. Not that that helps taller women though!
I mostly just avoid clothes shopping and stick exclusively to Sea Salt and Pact as their quality and sizing are consistent, and afford their higher prices by just buying clothes very occasionally (once or twice a year) and only things I will wear for years. Until very recently, this was how most people shopped for clothes; I think a lot of the problems being discussed on here are downstream of the kind of clothing habits where it’s considered normal to be constantly buying new things that will end up only being worn a few times.