Haha yes, good joke, by the way, have you seen these new fangled automobiles? They'll never replace the good old fashioned horse and carriage. I also hear some Austrian dickhead is making moves in Germany - hope it doesn't spark another war. Anyway, I'm off to beat my wife and suppress my emotions, because it's apparently 1920.
Well, some probably. But also, humans are often violent. It's pretty hardwired in. And some men are wired to be more violent than others unfortunately. That's before we even get into cycles of abuse and all that environmental stuff. Like, the 1920s were three generations ago. Not excusing them at all, but lots of men are dealing with generational trauma that easily goes back further than that.
As a trans woman who spent a lot of her life as a violent man, I have some perspective on this.
The tendency to blow up and hit things? Those are panic attacks. Men don't like to think of themselves as having sissy emotional problems and so they just try to stubbornly power through their panic by yelling and hitting things, but like, a good cry really fucking helps you know? Meds too! Take a break, get some fresh air, take some deep breaths, fix your makeup, it's going to be okay. No need to break shit.
Excuses. Trauma can cause aberrant behaviour, true, but unless your moral center is corrupted by toxic belieds, you will recognise those behaviours as wrong and feel bad about it. The types of people who think the dynamic pictured in the OP are standard have either been raised with or have discovered and adopted an ideology of patriarchy, that presents such "wife bad" mentality as morally good.
So yes, you may have anger issues or problems with violence because of trauma, but you will still feel remorse because you now it's wrong. Or, on the other hand, you may simply believe that such violence and domination is the natural social order and thus be a toxic scumbag.
The toxic beliefs that are taught are part of the trauma. Certainly not an excuse, no, but good to be aware of if we want to help people break the cycle.
As far as the whole "sleep on the couch" thing, I don't tend to think grown adults should be telling one another where they're allowed to sleep just because one of them is upset, but that's a different topic.
Explanations aren't excuses, and without explanations we can't fix the problem. Villainizing can be useful and certainly feels good but it doesn't accomplish much else.