It was new technology, 3D was a fairly new concept in gaming in the mid 90s. But it took so long to get properly implemented. You have super mario 64, gex enter the gecko, lemmings 3D. I am wondering if it was a business decision and not the devs who pushed for a free roaming camera, since it was clearly not a satisfactory result gameplay wise. Because at the same era, you have games with fixed camera angles that are much better experiences overall.
I mean, they didn't even have two analogue sticks to work with in a lot of early 3D games as well as a non-standard number of buttons (and most had up to half as few as is standard today). Some of the limits were just a lack of inputs to control everything you'd want the player to control.