Comment by cubefox

Yeah, that's another point: the modern first-person controls you describe were once thought to be counterintuitive compared to the old Wolfenstein style controls.

A similar point holds for third-person games: Before Super Mario 64, all third-person games had Wolfenstein style tank controls where left/right rotates the character in place and up/down makes it move forward/backward. E.g. Tomb Raider or Mega Man Legends. The idea to make character movement relative to the camera viewpoint wasn't obvious.

(Though the Tomb Raider developers tried to work around this to a degree by fixing the camera behind the character, which prevented to most counterintuitive control issues Mega Man Legends had, but also meant free camera rotation was impossible.)