With respect to the blockchain, almost all of the technology is available before bitcoin, but no one thinks it works until bitcoin, so bitcoin is the first successful application of blockchain technology. To the extent that bitcoin is the first blockchain there's nothing wrong with it. If you want to understand the blockchain technology, Bitcoin is indeed a thing that can't go around.
Blockchain did not exist before bitcoin. It was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchaini think technically we can say there WAS blockchain before bitcoin.
according to the history part of the link you posted here, The first work on a
cryptographically secured chain of blocks (which is the other way of calling block-chain aka chain of blocks) was described in 1991 by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta.
the keyword in the second paragraph is "conceptualised". it says first blockchain but it practically means before bitcoin it was little work, lets say mostly theoretical than actual large scale blockchain like what bitcoin started.