It was a fascinating in-between state. Reboots were possible and increasingly familiar, but not quite the norm yet, with all that implies. The Ultimate universe in Marvel had been going for a short while but was still kind of this novel, exciting, unpredictable experiment. Dreamwave's G1 was initially billed (I very hazily remember this from an old Wizard article) as filling in the gap between Season 2 and the Movie, so even that was still in the old paradigm of maintaining continuity. And this was well after the mid-90s marketing-driven Marvel reboots had ended up being haggled down to soft reboots or alternate universe things to keep that audience somewhat interested.
Even in adaptations, "something deliberately being different from the original (in small and large ways)" was still something audiences in different areas saw as an aberration rather than the done thing. For every Hitchhiker's Guide fandom that half-expected each adaptation to go its own way in some respects, there were Marvel fans who occupied themselves with complaining that Movie Wolverine was too tall. Out-and-out reboots that started entirely new things were kind of daunting, which is an artifact of the inertia of holding onto a continuity or status quo for so long. But the possibility they represented was indeed fun, and that's something I sorely miss now -- the sharp irony is that everything's a damn reboot or new universe now, but we haven't gotten any Generations-line fiction in years, and the last time we did it was the WFC "aNiMe" that was... certainly a thing that existed.
I do think that was part of what made the fan experience interesting. I think it came from gaps being present and left as gaps, not either filled in by official media created to fill in those gaps (and I'm not even talking about ridiculousness like AVP here), or distracted from by more more more product (or media not necessarily meant to fill in those gaps) to occupy us with. And that wild west feel of everything being a possible frontier, with space left for us to fill in the gaps in our own ways, was powerful. The quality of the theories and the fanfic would vary, of course, but I remember avidly seeking them out for the fun of seeing how this writer or that played with the concepts.
I genuinely don't care one way or the other about whether or not it was a direct line of ancestry in Primal's case (I do remember seeing this somewhere, maybe a Skir Q and A, and shrugging at it mattering so much to some even then), but I do agree that "he's our ancestor" is a very different thing from "my ancestor".
