The more I've read about premodern Europe (mostly England and her colonies admittedly) the more I'm surprised at just how central alcohol was to daily lives. Rum rations were considered an essential part of a worker or soldiers pay, and I've read a lot of diary entries from the time basically talking about how shitty their day is and how rum/grog is the greatest comfort they have. Drinking was also bad enough to see mass social movements against it in the early US, but even before then it seems to have been endemic, and frankly it seems like a shockingly high percentage of society would have been considered functional alcoholics today. Is this modern perspective accurate?
You're treading on at least a couple of different academic disciplines by asking this question and I'm not even all that well qualified as a historian but I'll try to give in a generalists' approach.
First, we moderns generally define alcoholism as an addiction to alcohol. There are loads of people who just drink too much who aren't "alcoholics" in the strictest technical sense. There's no particularly good reason to suspect that alcoholism as we'd define it today was any more prevalent at other times in history than it is today, though, to your point, certainly the consumption of alcohol was a good deal more widespread.
Second, we should also note that, due to the widespread consumption of alcohol, many historic alcoholic beverages were likely considerably weaker than what we'd be accustomed to today. There's an older AskHistorians thread about this though, our moderators will probably blanche at the quality of the sub back then. Related to this notion of less-alcoholic beverages is the theory that much historical consumption of alcohol served to make otherwise unsafe water safe to drink. This theory has its problems, no doubt, not the least of which is that the mechanism of action was unknown for thousands of years, but you can find plenty of pop and scholarly writing on the topic. See "Inventing Wine" for a pop treatment of that.
Third, we probably need to disambiguate ancient, medieval, and modern drinking cultures. The American temperance movement is largely in response to the way in which working class Americans related to bars, alcohol, and society writ large and while the movement rapidly became about how alcohol was the problem, the impetus for it was more to do with how social drinking, especially in bars/saloons, and especially the buying of rounds as a social event tended to encourage binge drinking and therefore drunkenness and the familial issues that go along with that.
To that end, it's probably worth noting that the issue at hand there was thus not alcoholism -- the men frequenting the saloons certainly drank more frequently than we do today but were generally not doing so as a coping mechanism -- but social binge drinking. That is to say that they were no more alcoholics than the typical American college student. Again, a good pop-treatment of this topic may be found in America Walks Into A Bar.
In summary, I'd suggest that we moderns would likely find the consumption of alcohol in pre-modern times concerning but not egregiously so save in a few specific circumstances not much different in character than a collegiate Saturday night.
I remember reading a good answer to a similar question on this very sub a few months ago... here's a link to the question
To focus on rum rations, does this describe the use of addictive substances to gain control over the wider lower classes of workers? They feel privileged to be given such “luxuries”? And then they become dependant on these “luxuries” and therefore easier to control?
You might be interested in a thread from last month that was started by a similar question related to the alcohol consumption in colonies/early USA.