True, but it goes way beyond that. Even if the contestants had laxer game laws to work with, subsistence in that environ, alone and without technology, is a toughie. Big game trapping would most likely fail etc.
People have never coped with the woodland, or wild coast, alone and without tech. Simply having a spouse makes a huge difference, as labor can be divided, ie. classic hunting and gathering, plus procuring firewood, clothing, shelter etc. Being alone, you are either gathering fuel or fishing, or patching up your moccasins instead of checking the trapline, not doing both.
Masses of local in-depth know-how was always a prerequisite for living off the land (personally, here up north, I’ve learned it takes about two years of active field experience to learn the lay of new land and it’s creatures enough to do a good job with low-tech hunting & gathering).
Regarding the no-tech issue, even Native Vancouver Island individuals would’ve been fucked, if their extra clothing & footwear, big game bows and arrows, fish traps, trap triggers, containers etc. were taken away. Just not as fucked up as the Alone contestants end up being.
With Naked and Afraid, a shorter-term but more extreme “True Survival” show, viewers often underestimate the impact of most any natural environment on naked, tech-less humans.
From what I’ve seen, many contestants’ feet quickly get torn up which makes everything hard, though that is modern person problem.
Even in the Tropics / Semi-Tropics episodes, the nights are often cold. Try sleeping without clothes or insulation in 10 C temps, in the rain, with clouds of mosquitoes & mites. Fire would be a big help, but the more you need it, the harder it is to get.
Lack of sleep, lack of water, lack of food, hypothermia, sunburn, various small injuries, insect bites etc. all add up. The people in the show are somewhat badass, but still they fall apart. I’m not surprised.
Sometimes the N & A contestants do silly mistakes. One episode had a couple who tried to purify water by boiling it with hot rocks in bamboo containers. They used a small amount of small pebbles that clearly weren’t hot enough to do the job, realized the water didn’t even get hot, abandonded the idea and ended up with dehydration and water-born parasite infections.
Simply fine-tuning the time-tested Paleo tech they tried would’ve solved their hydration issues, and made a massive difference. Even better, had either of them actually boiled water using hot rocks before, they wouldn’t have failed the first time.