I'm always trying to limit the amount of clunkiness in morrowind that I apologise for as a product of its time, and in practice this looks like pointing new players towards the manual before trying to explain anything, because it's actually an incredibly casualised and approachable game for its era. it's simplified to the point where I don't think that hyping it up as an impenetrable monolith of bygone design does anything but make people less receptive to games with actual friction
a lot of its most arbitrary mechanics are the result of it trying to simplify a system that was much less approachable to a casual audience before it. almost all of its biggest problems (barring actual bugs) are in what it does automatically while smoothing over a crunchier system (see: attack types, or how it tries to increase your attributes automatically in ways that can fuck up your health pool)
this is also, generally speaking, why morrowind's initial reception was one of mainstream and fandom positivity along with complaints from a core crpg audience. that seems unthinkable now, but you can't really achieve an understanding of a game (that is, to meet a game on its own terms) if you place every 20+ year old game into an amorphous mass of "it is old, and old games were harder"
you also see this with, to pull an incredibly adjacent example, world of warcraft. part of understanding what it's actually doing requires you to understand what systems from everquest it is abridging, so you can properly appreciate what design decisions the developers were making beyond "they didn't know what they were doing yet" or "we've forgotten how to do things like this"
while it's true that over-contextualising older games can lead to you forgetting that there isn't an expiration date on the experience of artwork, it's also true that the body of conversations which makes up genre should not be ignored when trying to read for intent
it's like trying to understand fine dining without wanting to listen to the explanations of what you're eating, and what you should be tasting for. things are often greater than the sum of their parts in a way which cannot be retrieved without really considering what you're expected to notice
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