It's weird, isn't it, that someone can say that the people who actually experienced something had no idea what they were doing.
So ... I guess I have to go with gaslighting at this point? Seriously, you get that you're basically saying that all of us Olds were just too stupid to understand the game we were playing, right?
It's pretty amazing that we can even get our truckz out on these here internetz without getting flat tires! Personally, I probably lack the brainpower to complete a sentence, let alone to handle complexities of rules and stuff like that (it's sounds difficult!) but I'm sure someone back then must have been able to read, or something.
Naw ... probably not.
Yes, I will literally say they were comparatively too dumb to know what they were doing. MMORPG players were also comparatively dumb in the 90s compared to how they are now. It's not that they're dumb as people (although certainly some of them are), it's that they were dumb in regards to how to properly utilize a new game system. Just because they experienced it, doesn't mean they were doing it right. It doesn't matter so long as they had fun using it the way they did, because it is just a game after all, but that doesn't mean they did it correctly as per how the rules were written. Point is that if the game system said you can't do Y because X will happen, you're reading it wrong to assume that Y is impossible. What it means is that if you do Y, X will happen. Likewise, if you read that a Magic User can't use a longsword because they lack the martial training necessary, that does not mean they can never hold onto a longsword for as long as they live or else a paradox occurs. It means that even if they pick it up, they gain no benefit for using it, or suffer the indicated penalties, because they lack the martial training to utilize it in combat.
If you read these things otherwise, you're wrong. Even if you enforce it that way at your table, which you're free to do, you're still wrong in terms of RAW.