In my experience, old-school games (whether properly from back in the day or the newer ones trying to emulate that style) have zero issue with starting characters being peasants with pitchforks. When they say zero-to-hero they actually mean it. See the DCC RPG 0-level character funnel as an example. See also the list of secondary skills in the AD&D books. You made a living as a bowyer/fletcher, now you're a treasure hunter...go.
Modern games (and to an extent modern gamers) recoil from that hard. So much so that anything less than a novel-length epic backstory that would take any character in any system from level 1 to level 36...yet the "starting character" has, typically, 0 XP. They seem to entirely skip over the slight step up from starting as a peasant with a pitchfork, which is starting with implied training...they move right past that and want to start as the characters at the end of Lord of the Rings before they sit down and play a single session.