"Traditions exist due to folks being impressed by how their forebears did things."

Naaaah ~ traditions exist because music and other folklore have long been passed from one living generation to the next, normally with absolutely no self-consciousness, no consciousness of "correctness" or conformity to any set of rules, and no pretense that anyone knew precisely how the long-dead members of earlier generations might have sounded, or what techniques they might have employed.

Young singers and musicians learning the old songs would normally, of course, be aware of following along as part of a local/clan/family tradition, but I seriously doubt that any felt the least need to scrupulously avoid adding of any element of their own style to what they learned from their elders. And I'm quite sure that no one back in the days of real traditions ~ as opposed to artificial academic constructs ~ ever cared the least about whether they were conforming to musical approaches or styles of earlier generations of "forebearers."

And as I've tried to point out on countless occasions, no one has ever known the actual sound of music made prior to the invention of recording technology. The unsophisticated "folk" of past eras, of course, took this for granted, and probably never gave a thought to the task of imitating some long-ago approach to performance.

Today, we have people who claim to know all about how people did and did not make music in past eras. Perhaps they're confused ~ we do know how some folks' music sounded as long ago as about one century, and perhaps these delusional souls figure that this means that they have some kind of additional paranormal ability to know how people sang and played ~ and that they NEVER sang or played in harmony ~ in the long-gone eras even before any music could be recorded.