It's easy to also forget but at least Fallout 1 didn't push 'it's the 50s, just in the future' nearly as much as especially the 3D games did. These older games also kind of did "the world moved on in ways" better. The first village you stumble upon in Fallout 1 is a proper Village - with fields, proper clean buildings people built after the war and everything. As contrast, in Fallout 4 200 years passed since the war and people are still hunching down in bombed-out and half-collapsed houses next door to similarily bombed out and abandoned houses with skeletons all over the place and former shops where parts of the (edible) product is still on the shelves. It's ridiculous and feels like the bombs dropped weeks, maybe months ago. Humanity conquered the planet by cooperation.
This dog-eats-dog lawlessness fits better into a time frame of Mad Max (the franchise Fallout borrowed aesthetically heavily form) where the big one was at best years ago and there's still chaos everywhere. After 200 years you'd have governments, law enforcement, societies, taxes, entertainment and even people that never did anything physical seriously working white collar jobs back. There'd be metropolitan areas. It might look very different from what was there before, but it'd be there. It just wouldn't be like this. Especially with the robust technology of the Fallout universe where some random asshole can stumble across a factory that was abandoned for hundreds of years and just flip a switch to get things running again, or build fully autonomous robots in his garage. I don't know. Fallout never really felt that consistent to me, although I love most of the games.
