And your mailman can also just open your letters. So what, it mostly doesn't happen in developed countries. Not everything needs an airtight technical solution, we have way less costly ways to deal with unwanted behavior.
Not in '94, sure. But a couple of years later it was common and SSL was still uncommon, for a bunch of reasons, and also everyone was storing the card numbers in plaintext on their servers too.
Telnet was sniffed. IRC was being sniffed and logged.