That's.... pretty inaccurate to say the least.

Headphones were designed for vocals only in the beginning. Hence a lack of anything but midrange.

It was a quick process from late 60s to 70s in which companies saw the potential of Headphones to consumers and threw the everything at making a good sounding pair, we got electrostatics and orthodynamics because of this. Headphones would sound pretty good from this point onwards.

Now in regards to bass, we never needed big fat bloated bass until the loudness wars. It was perfectly fine to have a grado or senn with a bass response you heard rather than felt and it was deemed a better approach to messier, cheaper sets. The famed Sony mdr10 was always regarded as bloated in the bass and therefore an aquired taste, now its relatively little bass if you compare its freq response to modern headphones. Once mixing became garbage tier, throwing bass everywhere became the 'preferred' sound, since everything sounded awful on a more neutral set. It has nothing to do with nonsense like laptop speakers haha. Just consumers buying shitty mixes.