[2023] Does anyone still play Pre-perk versions of the game?

There's nothing that forces you to spend your perk points or craft vehicles. You can do a perkless playthrough. Finding the magazines will allow you to craft different items much like the books and schematics of those old alphas did. You might need to visit the trader to puchase some items but you can keep that minimal and avoid doing any of their jobs and you should have something that is very close to the pre-perk gameplay.

Since I believe we start out a bit lower in ability than our character in pre-perk times I would probably cave a bit and spend just one point in all the perks spreading the points around to everything just to raise my stats a bit to be more inline with how we were back then as a static never changing character. But other than that just ignore perk points and play as perkless as possible.