Well there's Renoise, there's Jeskola's Buzz (the changelog starts at 2008 but I'm sure I used it well before that), Noise Trekker had a synth as early as 1999. Adlib Tracker? You're still right in that for the most part, for a long time, tracking on the PC meant FastTracker or ScreamTracker, and those just used samples. But we've come a long way since then in the early 2000s.

Buzz was around in 1999 (I think - I first used it in 2000/2001) but circa 2001 the coder had a hard disk crash and lost his code, and finally resumed work on it in 2008 from a much older codebase or possibly from scratch. I assume that's part of why the changelog starts in 2008.

I miss the 1998-era softsynth with built-in tracker Analogic, later called AXS (or was it the other way round?). http://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=11012&page=1

True. I think SunVox is a superset of what normal trackers can do: you're fully able to limit yourself to samples.