It is soon obvious that when you have an object on the sky in the eyepiece, in the finder of the camera or on the screen viewer, without a stable mount that object is lost as soon as you find it.
With magnification and a limited field of view the object will move through the field of view quickly.
Back in the days people was actually tracking by hand... That's like the days when boats where made of wood and people made of steel. What's changed?
Now we do this a bit different. Now we have two main sides in the mount camp.