I was routinely sending emails well before 1984, through my university.
In many ways it worked better than nowadays because there were no spammers, then.
If you were a user sending emails via a terminal session, I could see it as being considered "better", but if you were the sysadmin keeping (say) the Vaxen alive and "fair and balanced", it could be a non-trivial amount of work!
I do remember one of the profs grousing that "if you can't read your email with 'cat' then you are subscribed to too many email lists."
When I worked in Tokyo, all of our SunOS workstations did the BSD Unix thing, and we got corporate email via some sort of X.400 relay over an IBM mainframe (I think). This was before Mutt or Pine and may have been Elm or could have been something else - I don't remember. But, it was weird, because we could just Telnet into our compadre's SunOS boxes in the US directly (dedicated line). I don't know what the rationale behind this "split" was, but whenever we called corporate IT about email being down - they would always say: "What's email?". They must have used a different word for their X.400 batch messaging system.
With many services, after a certain size you begin to need tools to curate the content on the network, separate signal from noise, etc. But in a perfect world these could be handled and I think your statement would remain true.
For example, most forums begin with a small, dedicated user base that mostly knows each other and act in good will, but as the userbase grows all of these aspects fade as the Eternal September/tragedy of the commons effects take place. It's easy to see with the progression of subreddits for example, since they are created so often and can grow to very high subscribed counts, you get to see this pattern repeat pretty often.