What technical reasons do builders use white baseboards over wood-woodstained?

Question

I am Italian and I live in USA since a few years. I bought house in Florida. Why in Florida everyone has a white baseboard (that seems made of a cheap material), and in Italy everyone has a wooden one (mostly solid wood)? I find the white baseboard not as stylish at the wood-colored baseboard, but I understand it is personal preference. I am redoing the flooring and I was considering changing the current white baseboards to wood color. Is there a specific reason I should not do that? Literally, every house here has a white baseboard. Never seen a white one in Italy in my life.

Ecnerwal · Answer

Painted white is cheap. That's really all there is to it, no reason you can't do it differently, and you can find plenty of non-white baseboards in the states - but a preponderance of Florida housing is mass-built developments that are going to run towards cheap and standardized.
Wood is common in older houses, but once some idiot decides to paint it, it becomes a huge job to strip it back to the original, and the paint companies ran successful propaganda campaigns (which had the delightful effect of getting a lot of white lead paint into places it might not have been otherwise) to sell paint in the 30's and 40's

What technical reasons do builders use white baseboards over wood-woodstained?

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