> ...it prevented massive unconstrained expansion of credit and that seems sensible.

At the height of the Great Depression (1936), some economists proposed The Chicago Plan to separate the provision of credit from the money supply by eliminating fractional reserve banking, giving better control of the increases and contractions of credit, the elimination of bank runs, and a dramatic reduction in debt. There was a recent (2012) paper from the IMF [1] that seemed to find this actually is pretty sensible, although I do not claim to be smart enough to understand all of the implications.

[1] https://www.imf.org/en/publications/wp/issues/2016/12/31/the...