By the time I entered the workforce the world Pre-HR was mostly long gone.

I worked in all of one place that didn’t have an HR department. Well technically we did. But it was staffed completely by old guys who aged out of being physically capable of the field work. But the owner wanted to justify keeping them on till they could properly retire and start drawing Social Security. Rather than dump them into the shithole of retail.

To that end they mostly did Janitorial stuff and occasionally would do employee appreciation stuff and make everyone food. Only real HR adjacent things they did in the entire time I was there was tell people to tone down hazing the new guys after some particularly mean-spirited pranks. And conduct a handful of interviews and knowledge tests for new employees when the managers were too busy to handle it.

It was a rather drama free workplace overall.