Open source software has existed long before the invention of the (D)VCS. The author likely hosted a barebones HTML webpage or a txt file describing the project. There definitely was an FTP server somewhere with tarballs. The author may have been reachable by email. If you were really lucky …
People really can’t help themselves without indulging in some false dichotomying, with some historical revisionism seasoning on top.
You can have your project with PRs and issues enabled, but without any “community” bureaucracy or Code of Conducts or performative AI policies or whatever.
And guess what? That’s how most projects operated for the longest time, and that’s what many of them still do. And people didn’t go straight from ftp servers to CoCs anyway (that’s the revisionist part).
And this faux open-source pompous attitude, not uncommon in the microblogtard sphere, is as foreign to hardcore open-source attitude, as the dimwitted anti-meritocratic wave we had in the last decade.