I ask Jelal, the son who adopted me as the Grandpa of his family of nine and who installed my bidet, and he told me that he used a bidet all his life in Syria and later in Turkey where he had to flee during the war.
Here in America, we use toilet paper because there is an industry producing it.
The making of toilet paper has been, indeed, a sane economic decision since there were many wood byproducts that we needed to use after having deforested America to occupy the land we steeled from the First Nations.