Well, you might find some old or obscure distributions, which don’t have Flatpak support. AppImage support would be even more widely available. Well, and self-contained executables or self-contained archives have always been an option, too. This meme is mostly just a fever dream. The only connection to reality it has, is that many applications for Linux don’t make use of these technologies, so it actually often is much harder to install something without internet access (or a local mirror of the repository).
Well, you might find some old or obscure distributions, which don’t have Flatpak support. AppImage support would be even more widely available. Well, and self-contained executables or self-contained archives have always been an option, too. This meme is mostly just a fever dream. The only connection to reality it has, is that many applications for Linux don’t make use of these technologies, so it actually often is much harder to install something without internet access (or a local mirror of the repository).