Yes dear Aesquire,
Most WW2 fighters were the smallest airframe wrapped around the biggest engine available (Me-109, Spitfire, P-40 Warhawk, P-51 Mustang, Yak, Lavovchin, etc.)
If you look at a dis-mantled P-40 or P-51 you will see that the pilot's feet rest on the top of the wing and his butt is not much higher. That produced the shallowest and lightest fuselage possible. The firewall was barely bigger than the engine cross-section.
OTOH Vought F4U Corsair was a horrid combination of compromises. Corsair fuselage bulkheads are barely bigger than the corss-section of its R-2800 radial engine. Vought started by insisting on the shortest and lightest landing gear possible. The shortest gear legs had to be short enough to fit (longitudinally) between the two wing spars. Short gear legs required anhedral in wing roots to get LG attach points close enough to the ground. Anhedral inboard required extra dihedral outboard to compensate (roll stability) hence the inverted gull-wing. The inverted gull wing may have allowed the lightest and simplest landing gear, but it drove up complexity, costs and weight of the wing.
Look at how few inverted gull wings were built after WW2. Mostly transports (DHC-4 Cariboo, C-119 Flying Boxcar, etc.) the provide sufficient ceiling height in the cargo bay, but shorter main landing gear legs that retract into engine nacelles.
DHC finalized wing design on the Cariboo before they designed the tail. That inverted gull-wing produced plenty of lateral area ... well forward. Because the inverted gull-wing was so unstable, Cariboo needed a massive vertical stabilizer on a very long tail moment arm.
When DHC converted the Cariboo design to turboprops, they simplified the wing centre section by making it flat between the engine nacelles. DHC engineers compensated by installing landing gear in unusually deep engine nacelles. Deep engine nacelles still added too much lateral area, too far forward, but they did allow simplified wing roots and shorter/lighter landing gear legs. Buffalo retained Cariboos' huge fin, but that was well-proven for its STOL role.