This is right on! Not only are Gundobad and the sites he links to correct about this, it’s demonstrable, from the earliest D&D zines, that the earliest D&D players mostly did not use the “OSR” priorities. Even the idea of “grim and weird” that has come to predominate as the OSR aesthetic (and which is the topic of this thread) is very far from the prevailing tone of many of the earliest D&D players’ games–which could be pretty darn silly and inconsistent by our concepts of fantasy adventure today: elevators in dungeons, wandering ninjas and rabid dogs in dungeons, characters turned into giant cockroaches, lots of breaking of the fourth wall, and more along these lines. After all, the earliest players were weaving new genres out of various old materials.
If I can audaciously quote myself from a year and a half ago:
OSR, then, was not old-school. It was innovation clad in retro gear, like so many other pop culture products, like “punk bands” in the 2000s. OSR was a “new-school” rejection of current mass-marketed trends. It found inspiration in older iterations of D&D that antedated the features OSR proponents disliked. This was not possible without the Open Game License that Wizards of the Coast created, giving entrepreneurs the right to repackage and resell old goods. But nostalgia was a powerful source of appeal.
Writing this kind of thing, that “OSR” is a misnomer, earned me the label of “revisionist” for a few vocal OSR fans, but my point was that the OSR is “revisionist” if anything is. It overwrote the actual written record with its own priorities, to promote itself against the Big Corporation.
The first people that said “the OSR is dead,” in 2011, were complaining about the commercialization of the “movement.” That’s what made it die, in their view (before any of the scandals blew up). The point is that they noticed it had instantly become a commodity, even though it had begun as a reaction against corporate mass commodification of the hobby. I would add that it was the sense that you could buy “authenticity” for your game (and sell it!) that made the OSR successful. Not that I oppose supporting independent producers of cool, fun games! (To me, what makes the NSR scene fresh is the abandoning any inkling of doing what was “original” and just doing what is fun in a rules-lite way instead.)
So, I’m in full agreement with those here who use the rules-lite systems they enjoy for light-hearted or hopeful or fanciful imaginary adventures with their friends, instead of using the game as a reminder that a horrible death can strike at any moment, and that investing in roles is not worth it, so just play the game as a game. If that’s your style, go for it–it can be lots of fun–but nobody needs to sign an oath of allegiance to grim, dark adventures to “do it right,” with any rule system.