That’s literally when I did most of my PC gaming. What was even wrong with visiting a website to download a patch? It was way more convenient to update at your own leisure instead of having to log onto a service that would randomly install updates every week before you could even start the game up like nowadays.
You could even save the patches locally and when you had to reformat Windows, you could have your games installing before you even had the internet back up, hah.
There was literally nothing wrong with downloading updates from a “shitty dev website” because they worked just fine and the worst thing you had to do was decide whether you wanted to run the install wizard or not lol