This is accurate. My guild started pushing MC in early 2005. We were all lvl 60, but much like the modern racers we were in a mix of dungeon blues and quest/world greens, we didn’t use consumables beyond health/mana pots and most importantly noggenfoggers, and it was around patch 1.3 or 1.4 so almost nothing in the way of class reworks or balance changes, and itemization was still butts. On top of that, youtube wasn’t really a thing in 2005, google had yet to completely interconnect every corner of the internet and you couldn’t yet summon all of mankind’s collected knowledge and experience with a single search box. Information on the game was hard to come by, is me point.
Guess what? We didn’t struggle overmuch. Couple resets to get Magmadar due to tranq books, and a couple resets to get Ragnaros, everything else fell over like dominos. Molten Core was. Not. Hard. Ever.