Further along those lines, it was a different world when the code was created.
Trust was a thing back then. Spam was something that came out of a tin and was made of dead animal. And passwords were limited to eight ASCII characters.
And as such, bolting security onto something that was designed inherently to be security agnostic is going to be a recipe for failure.
It had absolutely nothing to do with trust. People still worried about the security of their databases. Businesses understood perfectly well that their electronic records were just as sensitive as their paper ones. But the server closet had a lock on the door, and no wire connecting it to a global network of mostly scammers. It was just as secure as the paper records.
Trust was a thing back then.
No, it wasn't. The reason I even raised this bug to begin with was not because of some nefarious $BAD_COUNTRY hacker getting yer dataz from far away, it's because you have to worry about your own users first. I'd guess that any consultant doing the kind of work FoxPro excelled at (LOB apps) has found some clever boy or girl who discovered they can poke at DBF files directly. Long before internet connectivity was common, one still had to worry about your own coworkers futzing things up.