The 'hero simulator' stuff really came in with AD&D 2e, when the writers started trying to wedge in stuff in a way motivated less by the heritage of D&D and mor

The 'hero simulator' stuff really came in with AD&D 2e, when the writers started trying to wedge in stuff in a way motivated less by the heritage of D&D and more because D&D was the only tabletop system they knew and they wanted to stick to it even when doing so didn't make much sense. The trend continued into 3e, which got transformed by pieces into a quasi-generic fantasy system with elaborate rules for all kinds of things that were totally incongruent with the original dungeon-crawling tone, like pointlessly elaborate oversimulation of monsters (who cares that a CE aberration has a +3 Craft modifier?) or entire social debate systems. 4e backtracked on that trend somewhat by throwing away most of the superfluous detail about monsters and the unnecessary minutiae of modeling every aspect of a PC's life, but a lot of fans got pointlessly mad about it using condensed formatting for combat abilities and about how spellcasters no longer got to break the game with 3e's take on high level spells (which had all the remaining limitations and balance points from AD&D 2e stripped out in the name of streamlining rules), so we got 5e, which in a lot of ways uses the guts of 4e with a more bounded math (one of its few improvements) and abilities rewritten to be more wordy, plus spellcasters get 9th-level spells again. My personal favorite in the field at the moment is actually Pathfinder 2e, which despite originating from a mostly-clone of 3.5 (Pathfinder 1e) actually does a lot of interesting stuff by mixing bounded math and more AD&D 1e-like hard limits on safe casting and magical effects with well-defined mechanics, huge amounts of character customization, and character roles both in and out of combat designed to encourage and require teamwork for the best results.