For the Highland Pipes specifically, I am not sure about a lot of the details. But , just like Graham Robb has noted that a lot of the traditional clothing the French wear for their regional festivals was actually just what was in fashion there, circa mid 18th c., a lot of what you see these days of the Highland bagpipe is also relatively recent. Bagpipes were certainly being played in all of England in the medieval period. In much of England they then mostly disappeared. They persisted in the north, and split into varieties. Eventually what would be later be called Border pipes, often played with a bellows, became common in the lowlands. Some very gifted bagpipe makers in Northumbria would be heavily influenced by the French musette de cour to make small, very elegant keyed instruments now called Northumbrian pipes. The Highlands tended to play somewhat louder pipes similar to the modern Highland pipes- though, with only two drones, and likely a somewhat sweeter sound. There was a very unusual repertoire of theme-and-variations, an oral tradition now called Pibroch, that had some links to the older ( and vanished ) traditional wire-strung harp repertoire. But other than that, the earliest surviving music for them is only from the early 18th c., in the William Dixon manuscript, and some of the tunes in it are still found in a lot of Northern music in general- you can find a Northumbrian piper still playing Jack Lattin. So, it's not as though pipers drew lines around tunes and said, no, that's only for Highland pipes, or that's only for Border pipes.

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Someone else can go into greater detail about the suppression of Highland culture after the Jacobite Rebellions, and how the pipes were affected. . But after the 18th c. there seems to have been greater and greater military use of the bagpipes, and ( I think) perhaps less civilian use , because it was only under the Victorians that the whole Pipe Band model was created- drums, kilts, drum major, pipe major, regimental mustaches, competitions. Certainly, Queen Victoria's great fondness for John Brown and things Scottish played a part, creating something of a Scottish revival, or at least, a revival of things that were thought Scottish. On one hand, the advent of pipe bands was a Good Thing, because it kept alive the playing and a lot of the old repertoire, created something of a pedagogy for the techniques, and resulted in new music as well. If the pipe bands and Pibroch competitions hadn't been created, what would anyone have done with the pipes? It's a great question to get pipers talking ( especially over a few beers). But, on the other hand, there's also little doubt but that the military pipe bands also tended to make the playing style pretty rigid and uniform, making everyone play a tune the same way, tended to make things like jigs less dance-like and expressive in order to make them more march-like, and pushed the pipes themselves to be made brighter, higher in pitch, more harsh - pipe music today is written in the key of A ( well, OK, actually D, or A mixolydian) but the pipes themselves are pitched at Bb... and they are drifting higher.

Not to violate the 20 year rule, but there has been something of a change since the 1990's . Pipe bands and competitions are still going strong, but the repertoire has been broadening ( notably by the late Gordon Duncan) and pipers are now often trying to become more expressive, even if they have to play Border pipes or smallpipes to do it.

/u/Bodark43 comments on the history of the bagpipe in general