Clothes were brushed and hung out to breathe.
I was reading a book which looked at the flip side of innovation. It had an observation that the washing machine was supposed to liberate women (it is an old book with stereotypes) from household chores when it was invented. But people started wearing clean clothes more often : A shirt that was worn a few times, before the washing machine was invented, was now thrown into the laundry basket after only wearing once. The result was that laundry loads were increased to the point where it took women approximately the same time as before to do the laundry.
Perhaps time is not the only factor here, and also the time the washing machine is doing the work shouldn’t be counted. In ye olde days in the early 20th century It was still traditional in some places for girls to stay home from school on Mondays to help their mothers with the wash, a back breaking horrid process to do the entire weekly wash for a family every Monday, carrying water and scrubbing clothes by hand. I am pretty sure those women would not mind washing clothes more often in a modern washing machine even if it did take more time.
Felting during washing was not a concern for most old woolen clothing, because a lot of it of it was pre-felted, as it were. And worsteds don’t felt very well.