You're thinking of small houses- even my place has runs that are longer than 20'-30' in length and it's not very big. Most of the houses I work on have runs well over 100', some double that.
Since we're discussing surges, I worked on a new house (we did the Low Voltage) and when we came back after a few days, I saw that the electrician had run all of their Romex in the same stud spaces as the braided cable for lightning suppression. That would have been bad enough, but the Romex had even been bundled with it and secured with heavy wire ties.