Yes, perhaps, and at that time it was also a much simpler proposition to do that.
I would imagine at that time there were also many fewer kids at a high-school level doing that kind of hacking, so it might not be totally wrong to say they were all prodigies.
The Atari did, at least in the technical sense, though not in the sense you mean it.
The Ataris had a display process called Antic that you supplied with a display-list, a set of tokens that defined which antic-mode was next as the electron-dot proceeded down the screen. Antic would halt the CPU and take over the bus in order to transfer data from main memory to use for display purposes, be it character or bitmap data
You could choose from a variety of modes (15 in all, IIRC) and add horizontal or vertical smooth scrolling to each mode-line individually by toggling a bit in the display-list entry.
One further bit allowed you to set a DLI (Display-list interrupt) where the CPU would be interrupted and run your code at that end of the specific display-line on-screen - you had the flyback interval to effect something (not a lot, but you could change colour registers, character-sets, do a few register operations, basically).
So it was minimally programmable, and certainly not comparable to today's stuff - but it was groundbreaking in its day.
I would imagine at that time there were also many fewer kids at a high-school level doing that kind of hacking, so it might not be totally wrong to say they were all prodigies.