Like people who explicitly bought or mined bitcoin with literally zero KYC back in the day when it was easy to do that. And are now moving the markets buying and selling. Is that still a thing or not?
Or have pretty much all of the ancient whales touched an exchange or cashed out?
It depends upon individual users, if you are planning to sell huge number of coins, you need to verify your KYC with a centralized authority to carry on with the transaction now a days, but if you are planning to sell small amounts you can use DEX to trade without worrying about verifying anything. Things are changing with time and in the future we might be forced to carry on verification even for small amounts.