Yes.  And the second part (sybil resistant BGP solution) is maybe not as critical - ie if we imagine that Satoshi didnt find that solution, or it were broken unexpectedly, could we repair bitcoin and have it still work, just not as elegantly/securely whatever?

I think the answer is probably yes: use a conventional identity based BGP solution (of which there are existing eg Lamport himself in the original paper up to 1/3 malicious players) and work-around the identity problem by copying what i2p did for its identities from 1998 or  the nymservers  (pseudonymous mixmaster related mail service) did - require hashcash to create identities.  You might need to tune some stuff - eg the identities must be timestamped, time-limited use etc but probably you could make that work.  Doesnt seem so removed from how bitcoin sybil resistant BGP works even so maybe thats how Satoshi arrived at it.

The former question though decentralised secure inflation control, people who were trying to figure this out in 1997/1998 were mostly aiming for $-adjusted zero inflation which isnt possible without exeternal price feeds which are not decenralised/machine-measurable.

Adam