Earlier bombs were unreliable. It wasn't rare to have an entire squadron in multiple sorties to target a single bridge even in uncontested skies.
The bad navigation and aiming equipment as well as dumb bombs resulted in COP to be in 100s of meters in best case. This was exacerbated by flaky mechanisms: better to have UXO than to accidentally grief some ground staff.
That's mostly what we see today. Bombs in random areas because the flight lost track of position or met a cloudy patch of skies on the target and decided to drop the payload to maintain their return range.