Yes, but unfortunately, Lego has since then moved away from that attitude. Here’s a more recent Technic car model:
It looks cooler, I guess. It’s modeled after a real car. But the body panels and headlight covers and a bunch of other stuff mean that it’s only buildable into that model. It also gives up a lot of the engineering stuff at the expense of visuals.
Wow, that’s just… totally un-Lego. It’s just a model kit (with more rough edges than usual), that’s held together with pegs instead of Kragle. What else could you even use any of those individual pieces for? Most of them seem to be custom for that one specific model.
Not these days. Almost all their stuff is basically a licensed model kit. Just peruse this Google image search and you’ll see that about 3/4 of them are the same thing. Corvette, Land Rover, F-150 Raptor, Fast and Furious Dodge Charger, and so on. Some look more rebuildable than others, but basically all of them have a ton of custom parts that couldn’t be used for anything else besides “weird angular robot”.
The first LEGO set which I got as a kid, around 1972, was just a bunch of blocks of various sizes and colors. There might have been an instruction book with some examples of what one could make, but I don’t recall.
Subsequent sets that I got as a child were for particular models – I built that model once or twice, played with it some, and then it got disassembled, and the bricks were thrown in with the other bricks that I have.
Either way, most of my play with LEGO as a kid was building things of my own design.
I’ve gotten several LEGO sets as an adult, most of them of particular Star Wars ships. Those tended to get assembled and never disassembled.
That’s not true at all. It is very rare for a lego model to have unique pieces. For example, those headlight covers are airplane cockpit canopies, or spaceship canopies. The smooth fairings can all be repurposed for other things. I have quite a few large recent lego models and none of them have unique pieces.
Like I said above. Not true at all. 99.9% of pieces are used for multiple models.
Another guy too old for the kits. When I was playing alone, I built a lot of houses - I created some with trap floors, which was fun. When playing with my brother, we’d make cars - and smash them into each other (the guy whose car can no longer roll loses) or make flying robots, and smash them into each other (more dangerous - since there’s always the risk of having your hand get in the way of the smashing).
Trust me that @Dr.Strangelove has no idea what he’s talking about. There are 4 unique pieces in that set, the wheel arches. I’m not certain, but I think it is the custom colouring that makes them unique, not the shape of the pieces themselves.
My cousin and I did this, too. Except we also had a rule that every car must have a cockpit of some sort (either a slanted piece or a transparent piece), and if that ever came detached, that was a loss, too.
Or perhaps a velociraptor skull? The imagination is the limit. Some imaginations are more limited than others 
Yeah this is why there are extremely few pre-printed pieces. Generally they give you decals that you can remove, or not apply in the first place. All the graphics on that set appear to be decals except for those unique wheel arches.
Probably a contentious issue. If you read reviews, a lack of printed pieces is often cited as a negative point, but for someone who wants to use the pieces for their own creations, printed pieces would not be desirable.
They definitely had build-to-instruction sets 40 years ago, but they were generic stuff - “Space Fighter,” “Medieval Castle,” stuff like that, as opposed to sets specific to other media properties.
We never had too many kits. I think a gas station and an airport and that’s it. But we had a heap of blocks so we definitely built from our imagination.
When I was a preteen I got my own set (most of the toys we played with as a kid belonged to my older brother) which was a castle and it was a non-Lego-Brand set. I did keep that one separate and built it several times on my own because it was kind of challenging.
As an AFOF (Adult Fan of LEGO™), I appreciate the number of cool sets that come out regularly. Very expensive unfortunately.
Awesome.
I was going to joke, “Does it break apart?” but of course, as a practical matter so you can see and show off the insides, it does. 
I’m surprised it doesn’t come with an iceberg 
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But they’ve massively increased the total number of pieces over time. The total number of distinct pieces in that set must be in the hundreds. It was only dozens for my set. Instead of emphasizing versatility, you end up with something that can only be built into one or a small number of things.
Do you really think that as many kids with the latter set are building their own custom machines as opposed to simply building according to the instructions and leaving it on a shelf forever? It’s obvious they’re emphasizing the model aspect. That’s not inherently wrong, but it’s far afield from LEGO’s origins.
That they reused some of the same weird angular pieces for, I dunno, the velociraptor skull above doesn’t invalidate my point. The old TECHNIC kits had a small number of highly versatile pieces. Beams, axles, gears, pins, and a few other things. The only specialized pieces in my model were the steering wheel and a few suspension pieces.
The LEGO Porsche, despite having about twice the number of pieces as mine, has fewer features. No working transmission, no adjustable seats, no pop up headlights. It does have a motor with moving pistons, a differential, and steering (again like mine). Instead they slapped on a bunch of random pieces to make it look more like the vehicle they licensed. I wonder who is paying who, in fact…
I don’t think it is aimed at “kids”.