I've had hypertension since I was 17, but I never got on medication. I recently made the decision to completely give up added salt. I only ate my own salt-free cooking for about 6 months and I ate a diet high in meat, fish and vegetables. I did not pick up exercise. My BP dropped from 145/90 to 125/80 within the first month. I check my BP weekly and my average BP is 120/75.
My parents cook with a lot of salt, I notice this now when I eat at their place. I am confident that the high salt diet they "gave" me for so many years, combined with restaurant food, was the direct cause of my 5 year strugle with high blood pressure.
I could be wrong, but I am nonetheless very happy with the results of my diet based solution.
So which is more likely; you're genetically predisposed to hypertension, which your high-salt diet exposed in your teens, or that your high-salt diet caused your hypertension?
I doubt your conclusion, but it does make me happy that you've found a solution that works for you!
I think the salt thing is somewhat a problem of causation vs. correlation. If you have hypertension it can be a good idea to limit salt intake; but salt intake does not cause hypertension.
I'm wary of any health advice that stems solely from epidemiological study. I'm not sure why we so easily take a hypothesis as a conclusion, and epidemiological study, while valuable, can only produce a hypothesis that requires a controlled experiment to test. Yet it seems 90% of the "red meat causes diabetes!" articles we see are usually framing a hypothesis as the result of an experiment.