I think it boils down to the fact that baseball, and cards of the players, has always had appeal to a very broad swath of American boys and men, along with some girls and women. So let's imagine a smoker in 1890 or 1911 opening his pack of cigarettes and finding a baseball card inside. Even if he is not a fan of the game, is he going to just throw it away? I think he's probably going to stick it in his pocket and find a kid to give it to, or throw it into a cigar box. Same with cards that came with candy and other things in the teens and 20s. By the 1930s and onward, collecting baseball cards was a well-known hobby in its own right, so of course people spending their precious money on packs of Goudeys, Topps, etc., are going to take care of them at least to the extent of making sure they don't get severely damaged or even thrown away, although of course because they had no real monetary value until the 70s, say, there was plenty of that, as with the fabled moms who got tired of looking at the boxes on the closet shelf in sonny's old room. At that point, when it became widely known that dealers and collectors would actually pony up serious cash for old cards, the survival rate surely shot up by a lot. With the possible exception of the WWII paper drives, I'm going to speculate that there was never a substantial period in which there were a lot of situations in which these pretty little treasures would have been regarded as something to toss away like old newspapers or magazines, for example. Factor in the aforementioned enormous production runs of the big sets, and voila, you've got a heck of a lot of them still around today.
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