You are mixing up battery management system (BMS) with thermal management system. BMS is practically mandatory with multi-cell li-ion systems. Even cheap consumer devices such as laptops have one.
I think it's all called battery management. But early EV models did not have a whole lot of it. It obviously had some electronics to read out the current charge and put some basic limits in place. But no thermal management or cooling or any of the smart battery management features you see in more recent models.