Both of us are old enough to remember...
Decades of the Democrats calling all the shots in Congress, and Republicans being pretty much consigned to the cloak room. It was the "ground state" of Washington politics, and the Speakers wielded enormous power for years.
Bowser posted a thread on "nominal majorities," so I looked up the numbers on the margins in the House over the past thirty years or so. The largest margin the Republicans have had since 1994 was 29 seats, and the average margin over all that time until 2006 was 20 seats.
The current Democrat margin is 31.
Prior to 1994, back to 1972, which was as far as I took it, the Democratic margin in the House was never less than 71 seats, ran as high as 149, and averaged 95 seats.