I'm confused, you say you want the "old" versions of Winamp, but Winamp has had a media library since the "old" versions. Maybe you can ignore the current one just as you always have and not base your diatribe off one screenshot in an article?
I could ignore the current version of winamp, but I'd rather give it a try and see how much of that stuff is able to be disabled and ignored. It might still prove to be better than VLC.
Winamp3 came out in 2002 and it may have had the feature. It was total rewrite, added a bunch of stuff, but killed off a bunch more and a lot of people (myself included) never used it. Nullsoft was basically forced to keep the v2 edition alive since it was what everyone stuck with and Winamp5 was supposed to unite the userbase (it was based on v2) but I never bothered with it since by then Winamp had been owned by AOL for a long time and I didn't really want AOL software on my machines.
Winamp Lite was pretty popular too and helped to bridge the gap
https://download.cnet.com/Winamp-Lite/3000-2139_4-10788894.h...