Listen to old Steve Miller, Stevie Wonder , etc (original recordings). The panning is all over the place. Steve Miller learned from Les Paul and this helped me realize that what we now think of as 'conventional' panning is just not necessary if you can arrange frequency hierarchy and part staging. And there is no way I would criticize anything Stevie Wonder did.
I spent a lot of time doing critical listening on ear buds (Sony wired earbuds, no longer found IME) where the loss of space and extreme separation should cause a mix to sound 'unbalanced' according to modern criteria. But it doesn't. Arrangement, as in most mix issues, is the key IMHO.