Heathrow director. When I mentioned the 727 it is not so much a matter of what the pilot wanted to do but what the aeroplane was capable of doing. With the 727 you could be at 250 kts on the glide slope eight and a half miles from the field and still be easily stabilised for landing at 1000 agl. At a push you could do better than that . Tons of drag when you needed to slow down. Comparatively speaking the 757 is a glider. You get very little drag till you get to 20 flap and the gear down. The 757 will barely descend on a three degree glideslope at 15 flap and no gear.
What this means is that you need much more space to configure a 757 than you did a 727 and similar ideas apply to the other aircraft types you mention. Each aircraft has an optimum way it can be flown if no ATC restrictions apply and that is what you are seeing.
Of course, there may be a little pilot "joie de vivre" involved in some of those approaches also!