All of this never existed in mine or your days when our parents just knew that video games would ruin us with no way of making money in them. Even the dream of becoming a game developer wasn't even a thing.
Already at that point many of my friends were pretty competitive, even though neither of us really had the means to become HeatoN even if we tried. I think this must have been early 2000s something I think?
These days "play online" so often means "play with complete strangers you've never talked to before and most likely never will again".
Even for large popular games like Unreal Tournament you typically joined a set of favourite servers, and had the same set of "regulars" hanging around.
It's like old-school relatively small-scale forums vs. reddit or Twitter.
You can still kind-of get this experience if you try hard enough, but it's not really the default and typically nothing is geared towards it.
As an aside I miss the old days, but i also found grinding overwatch and eventually leveling up in my mid 30s (pre kids) to be incredibly enjoyable and rewarding in spite of the unmanaged toxicity. I don't have any competitive gamer friends and the match play i dislike also made it possible to experience something i think i would not otherwise have had access to.
(And Heaton is a dick, just saying.)
This made online games essentially a public place, where people might even get to know each other and "hang out", and you could join the same people day after day, get to know habits, make friends and rivals, etc. It was extremely low competitiveness, and nothing that happened really mattered. It didn't matter if you sucked or were amazing, because you would likely end up on the team with everyone in the server at some point, so people got wildly different gameplay experiences. This even meant that different servers could target different styles of play. You could go to the really tryhard team deathmatch servers with carefully balanced maps and active admin management for cheaters and balance purposes, or you could join the match on cramped Beaver Creek with zero shields and infinite shotguns and rockets, where average lifespan was measured in tenths of seconds, but that chaos was a great breather if you didn't feel competitive that day.
No matter how shitty you were, you could find a community that felt right to you, and you were likely to even dominate occasionally when you had good days and got lucky, so that even people who suck at the game felt the high of victory.
Nowadays, game devs insist not being utterly steamrolled by minute thirty is "not fun", and enforce near perfect a perfect 1:1 win/loss ratio through matchmaking systems, where you never see the same player twice, so they don't exist as fellow humans in your mind but as hostile "agents" that you must struggle against, and everyone feels average because your instantaneous success is basically driven by who got the advantage in the random matchmaking process. Everyone is forced to feel average about their performance, because everyone is forcibly given an average experience.
A lot of that existed long before now, but it was always opt-in. If you wanted custom servers, you could go have that fun and chaos, but if you were feeling competitive, you could jump into matchmaking and have the enforced global balance of that system give you specific matches you were emotionally prepared for and explicitly seeking out.
BUT..... companies had to get rid of custom servers, because it's way harder to sell digital items for a game if players can just go on private and custom servers that turn off or disable the checks for if you have "purchased" whatever skin you want to wear. All the bullshit A/B testing and metrics companies have made up to assure us that "people like this better" is just to defend their business strategy.
I got into online gaming with Cs 1.6 and cs:cz normal online was kinda competitive but you had a lot of joke maps or non competive ones(climbing maps). I don't think they're as popular now since a lot of games have matchmaking and ranked unlocks as the default multilayer. I'm way out of the loop mind you, I learn a lot more to PvE multilayer now(left4dead and deep rock)