> You absolutely did not know the names. Post author is just thinking of the names they knew as though those were everybody.

I absolutely knew the names of the people I interacted with and whose projects I used. I even went to conferences with some of them. When I worked on my first web portal for Ubuntu we had a total of about ~4 dependencies and all was vendored. I knew the person who packaged my Python libraries for Debian.

You might call it an inaccurate description of history but it is very much my experience.