Pedantic
Legend
3e play was much more about players invoking specific rules to do exactly what they wanted. For example, it was a tactic in scenarios not bound by time or noise to tunnel through walls after a certain level. This was not an emergent property of players asking DMs routinely if they could break the dungeon wall, it was instead a function of those players noting the price for an adamantine dagger and the rules for object hardness.Except "the rules don't cover that so you can't do that" was exactly the 3e mindset; and my example comes from a 3e game. 5e at least opened up the rulings-not-rules avenue, but some of that 3e mindset still exists among people who started in that era.
You're inverting the relationship. A subset of 3e players, particularly those who started with that game, read the books as a toolbox, and then applied those tools to their problems, instead of declaring actions and then checking the rules to see if that was allowed.