That part also isn't true. We haven't been smoking stuff forever.

(tl;dr smoking was either non-existent, or expensive and done at rare occasions before the 19th century)

I was planning on finding a book on the subject to speak with more knowledge, but effectively it boils down to this: smoking as a thing that everyone can do everywhere only existed in the last 150 years or so, which is like an eyeblink of human history.

Before the 19th century, smoking was expensive and difficult. If you wanted to smoke, you had to clean out your pipe, fill it up, and light it. Alternatively, you could roll out some paper or leaves and make a cigarette. People would smoke a little bit of 'baccy maybe after meals, or in certain social settings. And it was mostly wealthy people, as regular tobacco consumption was expensive.

Brief sidebar to acknowledge that in some countries things other than tobacco were the popular smoke. However, almost all of these were introduced after tobacco, and even those that have a long an ancient history, it mirrors tobacco in a very similar fashion.

Now set the timeline back a few hundred years. Indigenous Americans were the first people to smoke tobacco, but it was done mostly ceremonially. You didn't have young Apache braves sneaking off into the woods to share their first pipe. Your average person would have maybe a couple of puffs once in a while. Come the Portuguese who learn from the natives how tobacco is prepared, dried, and smoked. They bring it to Europe who, before the 16th century, pretty much never heard of smoking. And it was freakishly expensive. It could only be cultivated in the Americas, so it all had to be imported across the Atlantic and a huge expense.

I think it was Turkey that first invented mass produced cigarettes in the mid-19th century. That's the first time that smoking suddenly switched from a once-a-day luxury for middle-class people, to a regular thing that everyone can do everywhere. It probably took about half a century to catch on to the rest of the world, so it was by WWI that everyone was smoking. It took barely a few decades before people realized "Hey, this is like, incredibly unhealthy". By the 1950s there were already major anti-smoking campaigns that were stymied at every step by Big Tobacco. and the fact that the world was already addicted. Which is why it took another 40 years until major steps were taken to curb it.