They were shitty for different reasons. Notice that nowhere on this meme is "shovelware."

E.T. is always cited as the cause of the video game crash of '82, but it was really the rampart shovelware, no QA to speak of, and a lack of reviews to inform customers what was worth their money and what was absolute garbage. One bad game isn't enough to topple an entire industry; especially one that is only slightly worse than the best game ever made for the Atari.

This problem was, however, mitigated a lot by Nintendo through the late 80's and the entirety of the 90's by creating the kind of licensing agreements between publishers and the console makers that still exist today, as well as the increase in review publications. Most of the best shit (from consumer friendly practices to the games themselves) from the industry came specifically in the 90's thanks in part to actual curation of the software allowed to be sold for these systems.

At least you can easily determine shovelware from something worth your time when everything has reviews attached to the store page. Still sucks that you have to wade through all that bullshit, though.

It was an option back then. They just know nobody would have accepted it then because

1. Not as many people had the internet, and
2. The internet that they did have sucked ass

There were still plenty of online-only games. They just had a damn good reason to be online. Always-online in single player isn't needed as DRM. There are plenty of other DRM options that don't use the internet at all or at least only check once in a while when you do have a connection to the Internet.