People in the early days were techonologists, cryptographers, programmers, curious people. It wasn't political at all, there was no maximalism. I didn't get the sense people were in it for a quick buck. namecoin and litecoin was accepted as a curiousity, there was pretty much no animosity toward new projects. maximalism became more of a thing once these projects started to promise insane things and innocent people started losing lots of money. maximalism is just free market SEC.

I remember mining on my gpu when it was worth $1, I never did it for the money I just wanted more coins to play with and send to friends.

It was a pretty chill and small community back in those days. The politicization came after, and it became necessary, just due to the sheer number of cargo-cult scams that cropped up and continue to crop up around bitcoin.