Re: Spot on sir.
Drove my rear wheel drive through the hills in the snow and only had to dig myself out once.
My parents lived on top of a mountain in rural Vermont for nine years, with a FWD Toyota Tercel and a RWD Toyota Van (the Toyota R20 or R30, sold in the US in the 1980s). There were a couple of miles of gravel roads, which were occasionally graded but nothing more, before you reached pavement; and while Vermont is pretty good about clearing snow, there are a lot of road miles relative to population, so when it snows (as it does most days of the winter) it may take a while.
They drove pretty much daily and rarely got stuck with either vehicle. And that was generally with all-season (M+S) radial tires, not snow tires.
It's mostly a matter of knowing what you're doing.
When I taught my stepdaughter to drive, in my Honda Civic coupe (manual transmission, naturally), we had a nice snowy day so I drove around to the alley in back, ran it into a snow drift, then let her get it back out and back to the street. Took a while, but since then she's had no problems with 2WD vehicles in the snow.
When I was in high school, living on the New England coast, almost no one I knew had 4WD or AWD. We kids mostly drove dreadful old American RWD cars with open differentials, primitive suspensions, vague steering, and ridiculous moments of inertia. And we flung 'em around the roads regardless of the weather, generally pretty successfully.
These days everyone in the family has AWD vehicles because they're so common, why not? And it does make things easier. But necessary? I don't think so.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
