I was fairly confident my car had a spare when I bought it, but it did take me 5 years to work out how to get the security bolts off.
The trend for no spare is due to weight saving for economy, cost reduction, and an assumption that everyone has a mobile phone and a rescue service membership. It's certainly no longer recommended that you change a tyre yourself on a motorway.
My wife's car has a slimline spare limited to 50mph. When we had a puncture I knew where it was, could get it out and would have been able to change it, except I couldn't figure out how to get the jack fitted. In the end called the RAC and they said don't try, call us every time.
We had a Ford Ka that had a spare that was so inaccessible it took 15 minutes to get it free, but the headlight bulb was worse - so inaccessible it had to go in to a garage to be changed.