There is certainly significant overlap between the kinds of skills that students were expected to learn in an educational environment that traditionally was called more disciplined or structured (both from the environment, and in order to survive in the environment) and the neurocognitive skills that we now call executive functions. As with many other skills that are or were once assumed in a traditional, majority-culture educational institution, there were always some students who walked in stronger in those skills (by nature or by home nurture), some who walked in nearly devoid of them (ditto), and many who were somewhere in-between. In the setting, those pre-equipped with the skills were likely to thrive, of course. Of the others, many absorbed enough along the way to get by, and some always struggled with them in the absence of direct instruction. Not unlike reading and dyslexia. Or social skills and ASD.
A mediocre instructional system, implemented consistently, often is enough to get the majority of the population to a functional level, even if there are holes here and there (like the generation of whole language readers who are poor spellers, but at least have access to text). Similarly, old-school traditional classrooms may or may not have explicitly taught students EF skills, but having a system of any kind probably supported the acquisition of some approximation of EF. It did not, however, necessarily reach those most at-risk, who really required more explicit instruction, just as most kids learn to read even with whole language, but dyslexics do not.
