Dinner was once eaten around the middle of the day. It has since moved steadily later, dragging a whole vocabulary of meals with it and leaving behind confusing regional and generational survivals.
The engine of the change is not taste. It is the working day, and specifically the distance between where people slept and where they worked.
The main meal drifts later
When work happened at or near home, the substantial meal could sit in the middle of the day and everyone could return for it. As commuting distances grew, that stopped being possible, and the main meal moved to the evening because that was when the household was together.
Everything else rearranged around it. A light midday meal appeared to fill the gap, the morning meal shrank and hardened into a fixed set of foods, and the interval between meals lengthened.
Lighting and the shape of the evening
Cheap artificial light is easy to overlook here. A meal after dark requires light worth burning, and the cost of that light was a real constraint on how late a household could reasonably eat.
Once lighting was cheap, the evening lengthened, and the meal drifted further into it. The timetable of a modern day rests on infrastructure that has nothing to do with food.
The leftover vocabulary
The surviving confusion between dinner, supper, tea and lunch is a fossil of the transition, preserved differently in different places and classes. The words did not move at the same speed as the meals.
Reading old household schedules is the fastest way to see it. The hours are printed plainly, and they are not the hours anybody keeps now.