It's completely false.
The web at the beginning was a huge mess of static pages, hacked CGI scripts and no interactivity at all with the need to submit a form to trigger a full reload of the page.
Everything was absolutely synchronous and a lot of times the database was accessible directly from the public interface and some pages did actually have the connection string directly in the HTML for everyone to see.
I'm really not sure in which alternate reality you have seen web apps doing all that forever.
