Thats not my experience at all. I wasn't on a particularly competitive server, but on ours my guild got the second horde Nef kill. Raids were full with 40 people, 3+ hours/six nights a week and there were requirements for attendance and you would be kicked if you didn't meet them. Never dealt with a "wierd guy who didn't wear boots". You literally had to write applications and do interviews to join guilds.
Molten Core was eventually easily clearable back then, so much so it was the hardest to get attendance for the <1 night it took. But I still think that had a lot more about being geared
Oh your comment really takes me back! I forgot how seriously guilds used to take the applications and interviews thing, including my own. Some still do a facsimile of what it used to be, but mostly it's all centered around the applicant's performance on publicly available logs at www.warcraftlogs.com now. It's a simple process for raiding guilds to look up applicants, see how they've performed, and then decide whether or not they want them on their raid team.
Anyway, I didn't mean to suggest that all guilds used to have a weird bootless gnome-type raider back in vanilla. There were plenty of "hardcore" guilds around back then. What I meant was that there were a lot more of the bootless gnome-type players raiding back then, and they were tolerated by a lot more guilds and players in general because "that's just Jim, it's how he likes to play!"
As the documentary points out, the bootless gnome player has died out entirely outside of non-roleplay servers, because the playerbase as a whole decided that they want efficiency, speed and performance to be their #1 priority. That priority manifests itself everywhere in modern WoW.
I watched the YT video. The bootless Gnome was in MC within a month of WOW launching, which kind of completely changes my perspective on it. Maybe I'm viewing it with nostalgia but that actually sounds hardcore.
Playing with modern Add-ons seems like the biggest difference. The gear requirements don't matter when you are playing with an aim-bot.
Also on the Add-on front. 20 years ago it felt like it was going down the path we see in tech where maximizing metrics become thing in themselves. I was a Druid healer and there was definitely pressure to spam for the readouts vs. the actual goal of making raid succeed and not letting the MT/OT whoever die.
Molten Core was eventually easily clearable back then, so much so it was the hardest to get attendance for the <1 night it took. But I still think that had a lot more about being geared