Cheap and quick has been the carpenter's mantra since the dawn of time. One look at the inside of an old piece of furniture shows how little effort went into things that weren't readily seen.
Mortise and tenon joints are fast and easy (read: cheap and quick) to make with a chisel and hammer. You can bet carpenters of old would be using nails and screws to build all kinds of things, if they were as cheap and abundant as they are now.
As a professional furniture maker, I assure you that cutting mortises by hand is not high on anybody's list of cheap and quick things to do. At the furniture scale, we've had foot and spring powered mortiser since before we had electricity. For timber framing and similar scales, most of the waste has been bored out with manual boring machines and then the rest of the mortise is finished by hand.
Chopping is a pain in the ass, and people have been doing their best to avoid it for centuries. Hell, we're still inventing new ways to cut mortises: see the Festool Domino, which is recent enough to still be protected by patents.
Mortise and tenon joints are fast and easy (read: cheap and quick) to make with a chisel and hammer. You can bet carpenters of old would be using nails and screws to build all kinds of things, if they were as cheap and abundant as they are now.