No, back in the late 90s and early 00s, people were trying to engineer custom nucleases and transcription factors, my work was on doing molecular dynamics simulations to optimize TF sequence specificity (similar to engineered zinc fingers) for gene therapy. I wrote up my dissertation and published it in 2001, and then went off to find enough compute, IO, and smart people to make it happen (https://research.google/blog/groundbreaking-simulations-by-g...).

My approach would require custom engineering for every different sequence we'd want to target. With CRISPR, you just "program" the system with a guide sequence, you don't need to do massive engineering to solve a protein design problem.