There is only one person that can rule that out, but since this is their statement on the subject I would take it as authoritative unless there is a better source.

You probably have a substantial subset of the people on that list on HN, so it might be possible to recover a chunk of the 'paper era'.

I received two checks in the very early 2000s and my name isn’t on this list.

For the record I cashed both and have zero regrets. At the time it definitely felt like the right thing to do as I am not into collecting tokens.