You'd have to go back to around 2000 to find rates on a 30 year fixed comparable to today's. https://www.freddiemac.com/pmms
Historically we're still in a period of pretty good rates. However, the reality is who cares about what things were like more than 25 years ago. The new normal is 6ish percent, and we're over that right now. I don't think we're ever going to see rates below 5% again, not counting for some extraneous circumstance nobody can predict. But at this point any relief is going to be meaningful to a lot of people.
On the other hand, home prices are not coming down, and they probably will not come down even if there's plenty of overinflated valuations out there.
Therefore the only thing to give on affordability is increased supply to keep home values from continuing to grow in a pace that outruns incomes, and lower rates so more people can afford what's out there today.