Every couple of years, someone will discover another game recognisable to modern eyes as an RPG, which predates the late E. Gary Gygax enclosing the commons of grassroots tabletop gaming and enshrining the fake distinction between Real Games (ones sold by E. Gary Gygax) and "homebrew" (everything else, inherently inferior to buying things from E. Gary Gygax).
The reaction is always a muted "oh, that's interesting" and everyone goes back to saying that Gygax Invented RPGs, because that's The Canon, which like all of The Western Canon is a set of arbitrary Great White Men who have been declared axiomatically Most Important.
Gygax — aside from being a libertarian fundie, an aggressively litigious anticompetitive corporate boss, and an enthusiastic apologist for colonial genocide — also had obvious weirdo preferences in his tabletop gaming, which continue to do horrific damage to the form.
The handed-down-from-the-mountain authoritarian hierarchy of players-GM-Gygax is pure Gygaxian peccadillo, and we still haven't managed to root it out of the hobby as what it blatantly obviously is: the faux-impartial malicious PvP DMing style of one shitty man who set himself up as the god of TTRPGs on the basis of fuck all.
