I similarly remember struggling with understanding what "classes" were in PHP as a kid and why on earth they'd ever be useful for, seems like needless abstractions, but finally it clicked, and a whole world opened up, suddenly I could understand much more of Zend Engine than before, and software engineering became a thing I started caring about. Of course, later I was enlightened again so now I avoid classes.

I also remember the infamous "OOP" PHP war :)

Classes where undertood under Inform6 (a literal OOP language compiling against ZMachine, for text adventures -even more, as Tetris, Madbomber...) with two lines.