I forgot to talk about my bars. They are 780mm, but this is a 2019 bike with a 50mm stem that is designed ground up for this geometry (Specialized S-works Stumpy 27.5). The ST (short travel) version is a stupidly fast bike (130mm travel fr/rr), I’m nowhere near the rider to truly push what to can do speed wise.
I think that what’s lost about wider bars/modern geometry is what tends to also get lost in skiing discussions: air time and landings, plus rallying ugly crap while completely off the brakes (and for mtb riding in attack stance ass behind the dropped seat...the true backseat by intention).
You damn well want wide(r) bars in that mode, because you are starting to control the front end while the bike is effectively running away from you, along with stability for landings.
For what is more in the saddle riding, none of this matters a whole lot, and it’s probably reasonable to say that simply slapping wide bars and short stem on a bike that wasn’t designed for it is sub-optimal. Less a fad and more a hope to not spend another $5K+ on geometry nods to shredding technical lines without sacrificing climbing prowess.
Which is probably a long way of saying that there are legions of high end bikes being ridden on low end trails, and so some of this stuff feels wonky because slackness has a price and most people get nowhere near the top end.
And even shorter way of saying this is that the purpose probably isn’t evident at all until you are dropping ugly sh$t without any fingers on the brake triggers.
I don’t mean by this to suggest that people not address their size in relation to bar width, but more that there’s a reason most of us never access, especially given healing times these days (years).
Oh, and I am squeezing through a few spots and pay more attention to bar width, but I was never raging through really tight spots in the first place.
