IIRC you could resize the standard cmd console easily, just type "mode 160" (or whatever width you want). I don't have a Windows installation around to check it, but maybe someone can confirm?
All functionality used to reside in conhost.exe, no matter which character mode application you used (command prompt or PowerShell), which is why a lot of commands would work for both character modes. This is not how things work now (though a lot of commands are still shared, like “mode 120,120”) as conhost.exe now just decides if it should give you the legacy console host or the new one (with things like buffer improvements and word wrapping).
There are a lot of subtle improvements I think many are not aware of, like, if you paste in text with smart quotes they will be changed to straight quotes.