Well, your dates are wrong, to start with. Our family was eating yellow cake mix and white cake mix in the 1960s. No such thing as vanilla cake mix. And we knew the difference is egg yolks in yellow, no egg yolks in white.

My mom (born 1934) loved cake mixes, because she grew up with a coal stove to heat with and cook on. No thermostat. You just cooked stuff "till it's done" according to how hot your fire was, and you learned how to build the fire to cook "slow" or "fast", hence you see those terms in old recipes. Grandma was still cooking that way in the 1980s.

They usually just made spiders (cakes baked in a skillet on top of the stove, like pineapple upside down cake) because it was hard to bake a cake in the actual fire chamber. Same for cornbread and biscuits. Did you know you can make lovely flaky biscuits in a skillet on the stovetop? You need a lid, but they are incredible.

The fluffy, light, perfect cakes that issued from those cake mixes baked in an oven with a thermostat were a miracle to Mother. She still made her red velvet from scratch, though. Vinegar, soda and cocoa with cooked flour (ermine) frosting. No red food coloring or cream cheese in sight.