I think Reynard provided a helpful response for you, but it's probably not bad to analyze this a little further. I find it helpful to remember the following:
- Your game is your own. No one is coming for your game books to replace them with things you do not like. Whatever way you played in that time referenced in your first sentence is still readily doable.
- People on the internet espousing positions are doing exactly that and nothing else. They are not an enforcement body, and them positing a position you or I do not like are not you or I being picked on, forced to do anything, etc.
- In discussions like these, people have a natural tendency to leave off a 'It is my position or opinion that...' at the beginning of declarative statements. Treating the statements of others (not specifically stated to be such) as declarations of the only allowable position/action is a recipe to be miserable.
- They also tend not to always put in all the context into a single thread of what they think is an ongoing conversation. Thus statements like "I think people should _______" often mean "I think people generally should _____" with an belief that the actual limits, edge cases, qualifiers, and such tied to that will be sussed out as the discussion unfolds.
- Dueling definitions and splitting hairs only matter when they help to draw a distinction. "I'm right because the dictionary definition of <term we are throwing about> is defined as _____" is a great way not to convince others, especially if the term isn't actually the subject of discussion (ex. upthread discussion of theft vs. robbery, when discussion was actually about playing 'protagonists who would be the villains in a different genre').
- None of what we do here matters excepting our reactions to it, and our ability to convince others present the change their mind about something.
More specifically to the games being discussed, it's probably useful to remember:
- Most games generally want you to be able to play them with multiple framings and in multiple play patterns
- Few if any of them have been wholly consistent on a matter, even within a single printing/edition/version.
- A given statement in a ruleset may well declare a game to have a specific goal/character/be 'about' one thing, but there can easily be another statement elsewhere in the ruleset saying something different. These do not negate each other, nor necessarily have to be contradictory (a game can be multiple things). *Old School D&D absolutely was about crawling into holes in the ground and smashing bad guy monsterfolk; but it also was (from pretty much day one) about negotiating with them instead, moral conundrums, and making hard choices (honestly, the hard choices part seems to be the central focus the designers kept coming back to).
- Regardless of what the game books say, people have gone and taken the rulesets to go make their own curated playstyle since the beginning. Thus, if you're trying to answer anything more specific than 'what did the rulebook actually say?,' the answer is going to be an incredibly nuanced position a lot of subjectivity and without solid answers.
By all accounts, a hodgepodge of the go-to arguments on these boards. Yes, there's a lot of really passionate (oftentimes at least semi-hostile) discussion regarding the greatest hits (4e, WotC as a business/shepherd of the D&D brand, Disney itself for some reason or just the generalized
'don't get your ______ on my D&D' line. It would be great if there was a greater ratio of new and productive topics and arguments rather than perpetual axe-grinding, but that's hard to do with an opt-in discussion scenario (people are passionate about their preferred axe to grind).