Similarly, old shooting games before doom sometimes had no dedicated control for strafing. They didn't seem to realize how important it was. But it's bad.

If you boot up Goldeneye and Perfect Dark in an emulator, you can set them up with the control scheme that uses the C buttons as the second "stick" and remap things to give yourself near real dual stick controls like in modern shooters, and it's night and day. The games stop feeling clunky. The autoaim becomes actively harmful.

I did this once to my brother in multiplayer and there was absolutely nothing he could do to combat my fluidity of movement. It was trivial to just circle strafe him.

Having the two axis of a control stick do radically different things (turn vs move) is terrible. It's like playing a racing game where pushing up on the stick is your accelerator. It's just hard to use that input in a controlled way while also trying to deal with the other axis.