Yeah. It is a miracle that game run on PS3/X360. It is a testament to Rockstar wizardry. It still beat open world games in design. Also they didn’t bite more than they can chew like CDPR releasing Cyberpunk on many different consoles.
Honestly, this is just a case of you remembering the past through rose colored glasses.
GTA V launch on PS3/360 was a glitchy disaster that ran like shit. And just like CDPR, Rockstar had no problems hiding issues from customers.
The framerate would regularly dip into the teens and the pop in was atrocious. And that was with the disc version.
The online no-disc versions would be considered unplayable by todays standards. The entire world popping in and out of existence at close range. Just look at this shit...
This happened because the game was designed to stream in data from the disc AND the HDD at the same time. But for the online version there was no disc so only had the HDD to stream data from.
And what made this worse was that Rockstar hid this fact from customers. There was no talk of this beforehand that the online versions were gimped. This was just a surprise for people who bought it online.
The game was a buggy mess of glitches ( absolutely just as bad in every way as the PS4 version of Cyberpunk, and there's endless video to prove it ), including save file corruption both for your single player save file AND your online save file.
But the outrage about such things was not as extreme back then as it is nowadays. There was also not a working PC version at that time so people on consoles did not see their version as so dramatically inferior ( as was the case with Cyberpunk ).