Many early adopters did these things. I haven't seen a phone with 1.0/1.5/1.6/2.0 that didn't have either. It was so bad, that many thought that you must root your phone to make it usable.

It changed during 2.2/2.3 era, when it became mainstream. With 4.0, even the hardcore early adopters didn't bother anymore. At that age, the OS was already well established.

Quite a bit of that had to do with storage management.

Back when 1.x shipped, all internal storage (emmc?) was dedicated to the firmware/os and apps.

user data like images and music were expected to be stored on an SD card.

But later OEMs started partitioning the emmc in two, with the smaller partition housing the firmware and apps, and the larger being mounted as if it was an SD card.

Come 2.x this got official blessing, with the introduction of "move to SD" (more like "copy some static data to SD").

But people found this to be constrained, so they would root and use tools like LinkToSD to basically set up a EXT partition on an SD card and move whole apps there, using symlinks or something to make them appear to still be in the firmware partition.

Come 4.x the user data partition was replaced with a union mount. Thus writes to /sdcard ended up somewhere else in the FS. Later versions piggybacked on this to provide support for multiple users.

Note that 4.x was also the intro of MTP for wired data transfers. This because earlier the "SD card" had to be unmounted from Android to allow a PC to access it over USB.

And now we have the Storage Access Framework, that piggyback on the plumbing introduced with MTP to offer apps limited RW access to storage areas without the need for certain permissions.