ofc, this is in line with my little pet hypothesis that modern go originated as capture go (a simple game like gomoku), but players either found that this was less interesting because fights were much more rare, or they noticed the cool potential in the form of snapbacks.
Then the rules of passing were introduced so that there was now a “game end” condition, and scoring (probably starting out as most caps, but maybe changing to most stones so there didn’t need to be an unnecessary sac move) was used instead as the victory condition.
Then players found that the most interesting game was played with each side having two diagonal hoshi, which led to that being the rule (like how chess evolved the option of a pawn going two spaces in the beginning to lessen time), which the Japanese later removed.
Then the somebody found “hey, why bother spending all that time filling in stones and just count the empty space?” Which then led to the followup “why bother capturing those stones in my territory if we can both agree they’re dead?” and while the Chinese and Koreans used group tax to make the scoring equivalent to the older version for a while, it was dropped because it was just an extra complication at that point.
Ofc, this is all based on the idea that “classic games evolve the unfun parts out over time”