Yes, and in those old games we just played the events in the game, and by the time we'd finished them all we could afford all of the cars, or in terms of cars locked behind events, we'd beaten them and gotten the cars. A novel concept for a video game, I know.
Nobody ever had an issue with that. It's quite different from GT7, where you complete everything on offer and then have to spend another 400-2500 hours to get all the cars, depending how you play it.
If PD didn't want people to finish all the events within a week, maybe they should have put more in the game to start with? GT7 has less events than GT1.
I don't get where this "GT games always lasted for years" come from. You can easily finish any of the old games within a month if you played a few hours a day. Finish all events, gold everything, have all cars. You could continue playing it for fun afterwards, of course, but you had finished it all. You put the "work" in.