I can’t speak to the person you’re responding to, but I can share that in the time period they’re discussing geocaching was harder for many caches.

I don’t remember ever not using gps for geocaching of course.

But I do remember that the phone gps of the time, especially in more remote areas, was semi accurate for car navigation, but all over the place at times when talking about 10-100 ft accuracy.

However, I also never really Experienced any major geocaching community in person outside of people I was already going with.

Any community would have been online.