> CVS back then was like this too, including public repos, etc.

Not really.

CVS had too many flaws (no atomicity, no proper branching, no good offline work, etc.) Subversion as "natural successor" fixed some things and was eating some parts of CVS.

At the same time sourceforge, the GitHub of that time, started to alienate their users.

And then enterprises used different tools to way larger degree (VSS, sccs, Bk, perforce, whatever) while that market basically doesn't exist anymore these days and git is ubiquitous.

And many people went way longer without any version control than today. Today kids learn git fundamentals very early, even on Windows and make it a habit. Where's in the early 2000s I saw many "professional" developers where the only versioning was the ".bak" or ".old" file or copies of the source directory.