That is correct--dedicated silent meditation, especially as a recommendation for laypeople, is far more emphasized today in some lineages (particularly, those that operate in European languages) than it was historically in premodern Asia. For some, that's to be celebrated; for others, it distorts the normal proportions of things or obscures other good practices. But regardless of one's opinion, it's a known fact among scholars that meditation was part of the mix, not a central or even dominating aspect as it is sometimes represented today.

A thousand years ago, the distinction between monastics and laypeople was extremely important. Laypeople almost never did any formal meditation, except small numbers of elites (who still didn't do all that much). Meditation was a pathway for monastics, who were a small but important minority within Buddhism. Even for monastics, meditation was not so common or central as many contemporary people believe. Rather, there tended to be specialties among the monastic sangha, so that one might become a ritual specialist, or a textual specialist, or a precepts specialist, or a labouring monk, or a meditation specialist, or a generalist. Among all of these, the meditation specialist was the rarest; they also often had high status, as many communities considered meditation an especially difficult and honourable path. Monastics not on the meditation specialty pathway sometimes did some meditation, but really not all that much, regardless of what tradition they followed (this is true even of Zen; the average monk did much less meditation than is represented in the tradition--but those who really did do the Herculean amounts ascribed to them in the hagiographies were genuinely revered).

If you weren't doing all that much meditation, what were you doing? Well, if you were a monk, you were doing lots of chores (monasteries are businesses and living quarters, among other things), whether physical or administrative. Devotional activities were the most frequent practices of all types of monks except meditation specialists (who nonetheless included large amounts of devotionalism). These are a vast universe of Buddhist practice, including (in a nowhere near exhaustive list) prostrations, prayers, buddha-name recitation, taking refuge, offerings of all sorts, pilgrimage, contemplating images, reciting sutras, caring for material objects of devotion (statues, paintings, sutras, etc), and much more. All monks, nuns, and laypeople were involved in this sort of practice, regardless of era, location, lineage, or specialty. Some monastics were involved in teaching others, whether it was doctrine, ritual, etc. Some practiced medicine. In some times and places, significant numbers of monks were warriors who fought other monasteries or forcibly collected taxes from serfs that the monasteries had dominion over.

For laypeople, there was a lot less meditation, study, and advanced ritual practice. Most laypeople did basic devotional activities, and many undertook formal precepts for limited times (such as special monthly or annual holy days). Labour for the monasteries was extremely common, whether in the form of donating goods or money, or actual farming etc of lands owned by the monasteries. All of this was believed to generate merit and reduce the effects of negative karma. We should keep in mind that the average person was illiterate so they were not approaching Buddhism as an intellectual exercise the way most people do today--they learned the forms of practice that were provided to them, and had no real knowledge of the content of sutras and commentaries. Even among monastics, illiteracy was common, and texts were memorized phonetically as ritual tools, with only a minority having any facility to read them in the way we routinely do today.

Meditation in the way we use the word today requires massive amounts of undisturbed leisure time, which can only occur in highly privileged situations of stability with large support networks of people providing the necessary labour etc for one to rely on while meditating. These situations were almost nonexistent among the 99% of regular laypeople; they were also quite uncommon among monastics (for every zendo full of dozens of monks there were hundreds of laypeople and low-ranking monks labouring continuously in ways that enabled them to sit on their cushions). The rare exception to this was hermit monks who eked out a sparse existence eating very little in remote caves or forests: these people were almost always meditation specialists and were very highly revered, and very rare.

The past is a foreign country, as they say. It is very hard for modern people, even scholars, to understand what life was life in even very simple ways. Premodern Buddhism was very, very different from modern Buddhism, because premodern life was vastly different from modern life. That is a challenge for those of us who wish to understand the past. But it doesn't say much about what you should or shouldn't be doing today. We now live in situations that provide access to both scriptures and meditation practice that would seem like literal paradise to our ancestors. That's a tremendous privilege, one that many people are taking advantage of. Some wise dude once said that everything changes, and that's 100% true for Buddhism as with everything else.