I genuinely have no idea how people can stand inverted Y in an FPS. It makes no sense! You're controlling the way you look, not nudging the nose of a spacecraft. I'm very thankful that it's not the default.
If i remember correctly, inverted y used to be the default even for early FPS games. The option to turn it off (opt-out) was added later. The default was inverted (opt-in) even later.
It wasn't a universal default, some games like Quake and Chasm did not have reversed Y by default while others like Duke3D and SkyNET had reversed Y by default. Though all of them had an option to reverse Y, i can't think of an FPS that did not have the option.
And TBH i'm not sure how much defaults played a role back then, they all pretty much had very weird defaults :-P.
I recently came across my first game where not only is the non-inverted Y the default, there's also no way of setting inverted Y as an option! Consequently I can never play Genshin Impact. The lack of a setting is seemingly a long-running issue in forums, as the developers seem to be ignoring requests to implement it.
