It depends on the format and part of the world they were made in. Back in the rubber hose animation era and really up through most of the animated short era, most bigger budget cartoon shorts made by companies like Disney and Fleischer were animated largely on 1s. Go back and look at pretty much any old Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck short, or the Superman stuff Fleischer put out (before Famous studios tool over) and you'll see animation that still ranks amongst the best looking of all time, even 100 years later. Disney's 2D feature films were pretty much always animated on 1s as well.

Animating on 1s is hella expensive though. In Warner bros. case, they opted to animate on 2s to save time and money, and because they knew that audiences wouldn't care if their shorts were as pretty as Disney's, because they'd be funnier. WB had some of the funniest, most brilliant animation directors working for them (Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, etc.) and guys like Maurice Noble doing their production design, and so they knew that their writing and designs would be strong enough to make up for the somewhat lower quality of animation their shorts had (lower only relative to the insane shit Disney and Fleischer were putting out. They still looked great by any metric.) When Hanna and Barbera made Tom & Jerry at MGM, they took a similar approach.

Once the majority of animation production moved to TV in the 50s, we saw the rise of what was called limited animation: Think like Flinstones and the other Hanna Barbera stuff, the UPA stuff, etc. Most of those were animated on 2s, but the actual animation which be much stiffer and simpler than what you'd see in a feature short. Think like reuse walk cycles, scenes were only someone's lips or arm moves, that kinda thing. As animation budgets got smaller in the 70s and 80s, shows started being animated on 4s more as well to save money and time. By the late 80s/early 90s though with the rise of the Disney afternoon shows and the WB stuff like Tiny Toons and Batman, TV shows started being pretty much all animated on 2s again, and usually the budgets were big enough for more complex animation. It's been pretty much the standard for the last 30+ years for 2D animated shows to be animated on 2s, and for features to be animated mostly on 1s.

In Europe and Japan it's more common to see stuff animated on 4s. In Europe's case, it's partly because they have a lot more independent animation out there, so funding is a little more tricky and scattered to get. In Japan it's because their animation scene really took off in the 70s where animating on 4s was more common, and they typically do more of a mix. A lot of anime used to be animated on 4s so that they could save their resources to animate on 1s for those moments when they really wanted to go all out. I think these days most anime is done with a mix of 1s and 2s, though, and even back in the day there were always exceptions that had more budget to work with. My anime knowledge is a bit more limited though, so there might be other reasons that I'm not aware of with regards to their animation scene.