RPGMemes

It's called Theater of the Mind, I think. It used to be the way we played ADnD, but I guess that the newer editions pushed the minis-and-grid with their more tactical playstyles.

I tried doing this but I could never visualize the fight or what something looked like... Turns out I have aphantasia and had no idea for 24 years because I just assumed no one else actually "saw" images when told to imagine something either and it was just a phrase

It's called Theatre of the Mind. I've definitely done it, and it has it's advantages (cheap, lower prep time) but I don't favor it nowadays. Especially in my last campaign, a swashbuckling pirate adventure, I tried to always have at least some kind of visual aid, because it's critical to that swashbuckling feel - the players can't swing from the chandelier if they don't know there's a chandelier.

Isn't that what the kids in Stranger Things did?

In one campaign, we started out using tokens of some kind on a battle grid. However, as the campaign went on, we stopped using it. For most part, it went okay. However, keeping track of where everyone can sometimes be too much. In particular, my character, whose modus is either hiding or healing, sometimes both, lead us to a situation when even I forgot to inform of our DM that I was hiding behind a huge statue that fell over. I was too busy keeping the rest of the party alive that I forgot where I was. Thankfully, when it was brought up, our DM just asked me to do an acrobatics check to confirm that I managed to roll out of the way and another check to see whether or not I kept myself hidden.

Keeping track of everyone's positions also became less important because our DM got a bit more lax about imposing those area of effect rules.

Yes and no. I used to do this back under 2nd ed. (Advanced D&D). All the later editions put a LOT more emphasis on measurement, making a play mat/map necessary. It's now close to impossible to keep track of flanking, cones of effect, blast radius, range, etc. for more than 5 or so creatures that way. You'd have to toss a lot of that out and streamline the game, but that might upset the play balance since a lot of tactics go bye-bye along with that.

lots of ganes, especially rules lite games like anything fitd, work well with that.

My dad taught my brother and I and it was always either nothing or, more often, just simple grid paper and dimes/pennies. Still do it that way if I'm not using Roll20.

I haven't played for a couple decades but never used minis when we did, occasionally the DM would arrange some dice if we needed some visual aides but was never measuring distances and hex grids or anything. Some of us even played wh40k at the time so it wasn't that unknown, we just never played tabletop RPGs like tactical games. It was also 2nd Edition not even third, so awhile back. Shadowrun games needed the visual aids more than DnD usually.

We mostly avoid combat when possible, or see if the fight is trivialized with class abilities.

If not we have at VTY