Enjoyable read! I just wish the brief tangent about BBSes had also mentioned dial-up BBS MUDs, but I understand the omission considering the article's length, as well as BBS MUDs' lack of geographic ubiquity. The most compelling aspect of dial-up BBS MUDs was community locality: all of the players generally lived in your metro area.
In the 90s, the only popular BBS MUDs ran on the MajorBBS/WorldGroup BBS software, which was technologically impressive for its time -- it could handle dozens of modems and concurrent users on a single PC running DOS, and supported pluggable games/modules using an event-loop callback architecture. However, it was also incredibly expensive for the SysOp to purchase, as were its games. This meant that any given metro area typically only had a few MBBS/WG BBSes, and they tended to be pay-for-access systems.
By far the most popular MBBS/WG MUD was MajorMUD, although there were also some fairly successful predecessors (e.g. TeleArena, Mutants, Swords of Chaos) and successors (e.g. The Rose: Council of Guardians). These games were typically "stock" -- they had sprawling game worlds but were identical on each BBS, with little or no built-in ability for the SysOp to edit the world. Despite that, each game's "feel" still naturally differed between each BBS just based on the local community.
As a teen MajorMUD addict, I always wanted to run my own board one day, but the cost was prohibitive. This eventually inspired me to write my own BBS MUD as an affordable doorgame for hobbyist/lower-end systems, which at ~20K LOC was the first large program I ever wrote. It did relatively well for its time period (BBSes were dying out by that point) but rarely achieved large concurrent user counts on many boards, which was an inherent downside to aiming for the smaller boards.