This is an interesting observation. I came into the hobby with 3e, but we mostly did our own thing. We didn’t really do any published adventures for quite a while (other than stuff like Forge of Fury). Consequently, I never got inculcated into thinking of my character as heroic by default. I wonder if there are others who share my experience, but more importantly to what extent a survey of play over the years would reflect the adoption of TSR’s code of ethics and the seeming internalization of the code as the default orientation of play in fantasy campaigns.