Luckymoose
The World is Mine
It's unrelated to your point that pen and paper apparently must use material to display tactical combat, and how that has been the case forever.
The last pen and paper group I formed consists of 5 other people in their 30s who hadnt played since their teens. We formed the group off the internet; not a single one of us knew each others from before. So all of their experience playing D&D or other RPGs were from different groups in their respective cities independent from each others 15 years ago. Now they had just recently bought 4e books and wanted to get back into pen and paper. When I told them wed be using minis and a grid map: all of them, every single individual in that café was surprised (not in a bad way). But none of them used it in their individual groups of AD&D and Vampire and whatnot back then. Also the only other comment we have in this thread on this subject is PrinceScamp saying he also played without visual representation of fights. This guy lives across the country for me, hes just a random guy (hi PrinceScamp!).
Im not saying visual representation is wrong, Im saying you seem to have a skewed perception of how prevalent it is in the grand world of pen and paper games.
Anyway, if youre so convinced, maybe you should go to the Wikipedia article Role-playing game (pen and paper) and edit in the part about them most of the time requiring grids, maps and whatnot, because right now I dont see it. Also change the picture of the people playing with a picture of your group with the full visual setup, because right now the pic might give the wrong impression since there is none of it.
Just because people play it incorrectly doesn't mean that is how it should be played.

Roll for initiative bro.