Given how so much oldschool glue (esp pre-war) was water soluble and one could rescue a card from having it's back destroyed, I would hate to have never had that around as a hobby option.
That option also "inadvertently" solved a few more problems.
If water-soaked cards had issues with card integrity and hastened degradation issues I imagine we would have seen them by now. Soaking to remove glue has been around in common practice for enough decades now that we would see issues in a few sets/issues by now, but most of what we've learned is what sets/issues can and cannot be soaked at all rather than finding out decades later they're structurally failing.
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