Not quite.
There are definitely a lot of IF pieces that are focused on simulation and emergent gameplay—Emily Short’s Metamorphoses is a famous example, and her Counterfeit Monkey might be the largest simulation-focused IF in the world—but especially in the early days, that wasn’t necessarily the norm. The original Adventure didn’t have any real simulation of containers, or of liquids, for example; there’s no general model of how one thing can be “in” another thing, just special cases coded in for the bird in the cage, and the water/oil in the bottle. All of Scott Adams’s games are the same way.
But this isn’t necessarily a deficit either! If you look at Jason Dyer’s writeups of the various early Adventure offshoots, you’ll see that the ones that tried to accurately model containment generally made the experience worse for the player, because the general system makes it annoying and tedious to handle things that were previously special-cased to work exactly as you’d expect!
(Nor is this sort of world modelling reliant on a parser. A lot of Emily Short’s works are masterpieces of this “simulate a system and let the player interact with it” style, and her famous Galatea could work just the same with a choice interface. More recently, Choice of Games has gotten a reputation for choice-based games that track lots and lots of different stats to make every character’s story unique.)
Now, that’s not to say simulationism is bad. Far from it! I personally love building general systems rather than hardcoding special cases—Scroll Thief arose out of a desire to generalize all the special cases of Enchanter’s magic system and see if I could make puzzles out of it. But I don’t think it was as ubiquitous in early games as you make it sound, or that it’s disappeared in the modern scene.