Pogs, Tazos, Pokémon cards (all cards actually), Happy Meals, Knuckleheads/Gogos were/are still all sold lootbox style.

I think a Labubu novelty was lots of direct sales and a deliberately(?) flaky website that had people frantically strategising for secret methods to get an order placed successfully. When you did, they told you what you got without having to wait for it to arrive for an instant dopamine payout.

I suspect if the website worked very predicably and you could easily and calmly reserve what you wanted, even with the gacha mechanism, it would not have been such a frenzy.