Yes, they did. But they weren’t world-ending failings. They didn’t to enrich themselves. They didn’t seek advantage. And objectively they should’ve either killed Gollum or jailed him rather than this back-and-forth frenemy/enemy he became. Gollum certainly tried to do plenty of damage himself, but today we’d have to view him as having a mental illness so that’s different faming than just the story written in the last century.

But, this is fiction, and how the story and characters were written.