Why haven't modern GUIs adapted to the shift in aspect ratio

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Why haven't modern GUIs adapted to the shift in aspect ratio standards over the past decade (or, why did we move to 16:9 in the first place)?

With 4:3, you could display two ISO 216 size pages (with a 1:√2 aspect ratio) side-by-side with some excess horizontal space, presumably for the application's toolbar and other GUI chrome.

16:9, being significantly less square-like, actually results in an excess of vertical space, yet operating systems and applications still stack their chrome above or below the content. (On the other hand, vertically reorienting the GUI doesn't make much sense either, since text is horizontal) The result is that pages are not all visible at once, requiring the user to scroll. The alternative would be to zoom the pages out, resulting in even more unused vertical space.

Even if a 16:9 were rotated into a 9:16 orientation, the resulting excess horizontal space would be way too massive for GUI chrome, yet not big enough to stack two pages vertically.

This madness must end. Death to 16:9, death to wasted screen space, death to TVfags. 4:3 or die.