I think the title and the body of your post don't match. The title is one question, and the body is a completely different one.

About the question in the title: very different forms of music were considered good in the past. Music changed, a lot. It's not like people were listening to the same kind of music for centuries (quite the opposite). Some people would stand against some particular change, other people would be support the new music...

Like, up until fairly recently (a century ago), (Western) music was basically just one genre (different variations of just one genre).

What genre would that be?

There were different kinds of music, frequently meant for different situations. We can't lump all music from the past in one uniform corpus.

I'm going to try and avoid rule one here, but... well, this is so utterly off the mark I'm not even sure what you're trying to ask or how you came to this conclusion in the first place.

What do you actually have in mind when you say "Western" music? Appalachian folk tunes? Spanish guitar? Swedish folk songs? Baroque symphonies? Opera? Sea shanties? Monastic chants? Ragtime? You've narrowed it down to thousands of years and half a hemisphere of Earth, and hundreds of potential genres.

One of the expectations of this sub is that posters have done at least a modicum of research before asking their question. It doesn't look like you have, honestly.