When I was new to gardening, I was surprised to see my husband trimming our mango tree. He lopped off the top branches although selectively. He said that he wanted the tree to grow low branches so it would not be difficult for us to harvest. And he was right because at harvest time, we just use a chair to stand on or a house ladder so we can reach for the mangoes. For the topmost branches with fruits, we use a stick with a net so the fruits will not fall on the ground.
Your husband was wise to do that. In the past nobody ever pruned our fruit trees properly and after a while we couldn't reach most of the fruit. Most of those trees have died now, but we've still got a plum tree that used to get very good fruit. Sadly nowadays the birds get most of it. I've been trying to encourage that tree to get lower branches now, but a couple of years ago the people who look after our garden cut off all the low branches without permission. Looking after gardens is supposed to be their job, but they don't seem to know very much about it.
I had no idea how important it was to trim from the top. Our natural inclination is to cut from the bottom up. After my daughter and I practically ruined some of our fruit trees, we learned the hard way. LOL Now we leave it to the pros.
I used to work in the Christmas tree farms, and one of the things that they do each year is to send people out with big loppers to trim the Christmas trees and make them grow thicker. You have probably seen those really thick scotch pines, with branches so think you cannot even see through them to the other side of the tree. They achieve this by whacking off the ends of the branches before the spring growth begins, and then the tree divides up at the end and develops more side branches. If you have bushes to thicken up, then pruning back the tops and the ends of the branches each year (or even a couple times a year) will help the branches to produce more side branches. One thing that I have seen done with fruit trees, but have not tried yet, is to turn them into "weeping" trees. I have a friend that was starting an orchard, and she trimmed the top of the tree, and also any branches that were going up, and left the ones that were growing downward. Then, she took some little plastic freezer bags and put a few small rocks in each one, and tied those onto the ends of the branches. As the branches got longer, the weight of the rocks would gradually pull the branch downward, and so it was similar to a weeping willow kind of tree. It made it so that picking the fruit would have been much simpler, since it would hang down around you instead of being high up in the tree.