Exactly what you and everyone else experienced with the game should do. And should have been doing the past 10 years.
The designers of 5E have been trying to break player's belief in the tyranny of "Playing RAW" since the beginning of 5E's existence. Originally they did that by telling us it was "Rulings, not rules". And that was reiterated every time Jeremy Crawford had to answer some stupid Sage Advice question when someone would ask how a rule was supposed to be interpreted, despite them having quite clearly told before to "Just make your own ruling. Whatever you rule is the correct one." But since that was never good enough for those people... those people still held under the thumb of the tyranny of playing RAW... Jeremy would just almost always reiterate the exact wording as the book said and told people just follow those words-- regardless of whether or not that intended to be the case or was anything he or anyone else on the team actually ever used or played themselves. Because the whole point was that the rules as a definitive, unchanging thing were not supposed to be that way, so stop asking us to define them and make them unchanging for everyone.
So now with 5E24... they're trying to break us of that tyranny in another way since the first way didn't work... by making the rules very concrete for new players to use. "Here's how the Influence [Action] works, so you don't have to get confused determining when your communication in-character with the DM should or shouldn't work. Just follow the rules for Influence." "Here are the spells and the equipment you should take as a 1st level character, so you don't have to be confused flipping through gigantic tables of equipment and pages upon pages of spells to figure out what you should take." "Here's some simplistic Backgrounds with every facet pre-defined for you so you don't have to get confused going through the entire feat section trying to find just the right one, nor worry about which skills or ability scores you should bump."
And they did this... knowing full well that experienced players won't use ANY of it because they don't need to. After all, we've all broken free of the tyranny of RAW for some things in 5E24-- do any of us really need to be reminded about the kinds of things we can find out via the Search [Action] or Study [Action] in the Rules Glossary? Of course not. For us... those rules don't matter and are not needed because we're going to just keep using those skills in whatever way we have become comfortable with over the years / decades and will keep playing the game as we always have-- "Playing RAW" be damned. All of us are going to once again ignore the rules for Stealth in the book (as most of us did in 5E14) because all of us have our own opinions on how we want Stealth to work in our own games and there was never a set of rules to be made where "one size fit all". And now... we can all just put those Backgrounds they created for us aside-- leave them for the new players who don't yet know how to select the supposed "right" options-- and create our own Backgrounds as needed. Regardless of whether or not there's an entry in the DMG that "lets us" do it.
The game never "lets us" or "stops us" from doing anything. Only WE stop ourselves and choose to remain under the thumb of the tyranny of "Playing RAW". So if someone doesn't want to remain stuck under the thumb... that person can lift it off themselves at any point. Just find the right group of players who agree with you.
