Depends on when you played. Earlier editions of D&D were much more like this, offering guidelines with dice and otherwise just leaving it up to DM or group discretion. This usually demands more of the group and also makes it harder to stitch a wide, cohesive story together. Later editions responded to this and added more mechanics and rules to D&D.
Yeah, there's a form of D&D which is "I want to tell an interactive story and see where it goes" where the dice are basically just a way to keeping things a bit sane, and then there's "let's simulate a computer program using sheets of paper and a bunch of random number generators" which I kind of feel is where D&D went.
