Quibble: 3e and 4e assume that the game world and at-table experience are less rigorously related.And that's why I think 3E and 4E are, in that regard, much worse designed games. They don't take into account what happens in the game world, and believe that game world and at-table experiences should be unrelated.
And no edition of D&D supported a rigorous relationship between the game table and the fictional in-game world, at least, not with an enormous amount of work from the people playing, usually in the form of rationalization and apology.