Theres kind of two timelines there.
Before the patch that brought the difficulty settings, people would invite randos all the time, so yes we'd have lv2 new players looking for farms.
After the difficulty settings patch things got different, people didnt need to have full parties to spawn a full group of enemies, so people started charging for slots in their farming teams, and new players not having the inf for that, they'd just do normal parties.
This era had the best balance in my opinion.
But then AE came around and well, no need to go into detail.