Building a base didn’t just mean a place to put your chests, it also had to be a place worth spending the whole night in. I cared a lot about making the interior a nice place to be. And the exterior of the base had to be a good fort too because you couldnt skip all the monster spawns at night.
Back then I took minecraft to be like a fort building game. Explore by day and craft by night. The first night I spent huddled in a small dark grave i dug for myself in a wall. It taught me that a good base was important.
I think beds were added in the halloween update if i remember right. I was blown away how they skipped monster spawning. That’s when I felt the game changed direction the hardest, because you no longer needed a base to survive.