I don't know, I won a friendly Super Smash Bros tournament circa ~2011 with kirby spamming down b with what was it, the c-stick? Whatever it was where you could do the super move or whatever automatically instead of having to choose how much power you wanted and just generally clicking random buttons.

The friends who all played vastly more often than I did and had all their techniques and edge jumps and recoveries and stuff practiced were furious.

Lots of "you can't do that" "that's not fair" "that's not the way you're supposed to play" etc.

edit: oh, I see your edit. Yeah, it's definitely not new.