Bob Monaghan wrote:

quoting QGdeB ;-)
Some cameras do indeed not have a meter. Again, that's another matter
entirely, without bearing on matter in hand.
end-quote

If meters were mandatory to get good results, and guessing per sunny-16
was not close enough most of the time to satisfy many users, then wouldn't
all cameras have some sort of meter in order to get satisfactory results?

No. That's another rather specious argument.
Try this one for size: since not every meter is attached to, or even built
into a camera, a camera obviously is not needed to get good results.
If required i'm sure some wise people can come up with a "rule of thumb",
later to be promoted to "rule" sec, to make up for
the-thing-we-can't-put-our-fingers-on-but-is-so-obviously-responsible-for-ou
r-"results"-not-being-what-they-were-hoped-for.

As long as there are handheld meters, why would every camera need to have a
meter built-in to proof that meters are mandatory to get good results?

Just doesn't hold, your way of reasoning.
;-)

the majority of cameras made being cheapy consumer models, many of which
have only three icons for "bright sun", "cloudy", and "indoors-flash" for
the camera speed settings, right? ;-)

Right.
So many, many exposures failed to produce anything near what should have
been.
Right?

[...]
My basic argument is that many of us can probably judge sunny-16
situations within a half stop with some experience. [...]

That's what you'd have us believe, yes.
You don't do so yourself. Why else would you put forward a "film is so
lenient it will forgive all our mistakes" defence? What mistakes would that
be if indeed we were good at guessing?
;-)