The world of data warehouses as we know it can be traced back to 1993 when Dr E.F. Codd conceived the idea of OLAP. A marvel for its time, the then-new processing paradigm for decision support systems paved the way for modern day data warehouses. Because of Codd's influence the idea of a purpose-built data system to process analytics queries and aggregations on large data sets was conceived. It was clear that having a separate relational database for transactions and analytics made sense.
Since OLAP came about, the data warehouse market has seen a bit of an evolution. In the last 20 years we saw the market adopt columnar storage with Vertica, then it became cloudy with Snowflake,and now we see the market behind to morph into lakehouses. However, despite all this change in technology, they all address the same use case: the classic business intelligence and reporting workflow.