It seems to me that the discussion here sort of veered into a discussion of standardization, more than constraints perhaps?

Maybe the two go hand in hand: sometimes constraints lead to standardization and sometimes it's the other way around.

@At mentioned languages, for example. I think this is a case of standardization leading to constraints.

An example of the opposite is shipping containers. While the idea (constraint?) is centuries old, it revolutionized commerce when it got standardized and eventually became an ISO standard, which only happened after WW2.