There was a late 2e, 3e, PF game culture that was based on serving up a long line of supposedly balanced encounters. Since this is super hard to actually do, fudging (either of dice rolls or on-the-fly monster stats like hitpoints) became pretty common. The question is whether it’s worthwhile to even do in the first place.

We still see some survivors of this game culture even today; some who have clung to those ideals (and keep on giving bad advice) and other who have mashed those ideas up with more functional ways to play, but overall I think it’s no coincidence that the reason D&D and TTRPG has been taking off and became bigger than ever now that we have a large influx of people who do not play “that 90s way”.