Again, high magic stuff has been part of D&D forever, but it wasn't everywhere you look. I and others made this point more than once above. Giving me more examples of high magic stuff isn't refuting my point.
You're correct. I really think people are looking at early D&D days (and I think this really started to change at the end of the 1E days, perhaps about the time that Unearthed Arcana came out, which was 1985) through a strange lens.
Just because a setting had things like powerful wizards in it, that meant nothing compared to what the game was like. Conan has powerful sorcerers and even elder gods in it, so I suppose that means it's not sword and sorcery either.
A low level OE, Basic or 1E game was an almost entirely martial character dominated thing, punctuated by a few spells or healing (which you needed to avoid constant downtime). It was a game of exploration and avoiding combat as much as possible. Kicking in doors resulted in quick character death as one or two bad rolls by the DM meant your character was dead.
It was also filled with gonzo elements and bizarre other worldly stuff at different times (Tharizdun: I'm recalling you). Those things were hidden behind the surface and often result in character death. The cultists in the Caves of Chaos were pretty weird stuff and would also fit right in with Conan.
If you look at the modules of the time, so the B series, the A series, Hommlet, you'll see that there was magic, but it was seldom if ever out in the open. I remember T1 had the ultimate revelation of the evil cult at the moat house, and you met Lareth who was very powerful. Again, that moat house could have been in Conan. Conan versus giant frogs? Awesome! Other adventures were the Lost City, the A series (the Slave Lords) and eventually the Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun and the Temple of Elemental Evil. That was what we played when not doing homebrew stuff.
A lot of those adventures had some gonzo elements (the later temple stuff was just weird) but at it's heart we were playing in a grounded, low powered world until higher level. The Temple of Elemental Evil had some crazy over the top stuff, but that was the capstone for the entire campaign after years of battling orcs and goblins and other similar creatures.
Yes there were strange adventures (Castle Amber: looking at you) but the notion that these were a ton of high powered games just wasn't the case, until we got to higher levels, which took years and years! Oh for the return of summer break and playing an entire module series!
The funny part is that if you had showed me 5th edition back in 1982, I would have loved it because the style of play we have today is something I enjoy much more in most ways. But to say that games of that era weren't fundamentally different from what D&D would become at the end of 1E and onward is just incorrect. The fact that the Circle of Eight existed didn't affect us because we never heard of them in our adventures. We were more interested in the coin for training and getting some healing potions to stay alive.
Now I'm sure not saying mine was the only way the game was played by and means, there were plenty of Monty Hall campaigns back then, ("I killed Thor with a Push spell" was that era's Pun Pun) but that wasn't how the game's creators showed you how to run it.
And with reference to the current D&D movie: I much prefer what we have here to what would likely come out of a movie with 'classic' tropes. I think a traditional D&D movie would be more survival horror, which would be interesting but probably not sell the game very well in 2023.
