> I would like to politely contest the authenticity of this specific detail. In my fairly strong collection of evidence, people just do not bubble sort without being told how to do that.

I taught a C programming class for first-year students for a few years at the end of the 90s, where one of the tasks was to sort an array of words, with no hints given as to what kind of algorithm they should implement. Most students came up with bubble sort. Insertion sort was much less prevalent, and the few students who did typically did a kind of out-of-place insertion sort. (I also saw a O(N^4) algorithm once.)