You and I did whenever we assumed the pixels were an upload of a digitized photo taken with an actual camera of, say, a historical event, or something in nature (e.g. some rare bird), a birthday party, etc.

The photo could be staged (e.g. Cottingley Fairies), it could be altered physically (like cutting or painting over, e.g. Stalin), it could be cropped intentionally to tell a different story (plenty of examples), and more recently it could be photoshopped, etc. All of these were possible, though harder than it is now, but let's not pretend we didn't "trust pixels". We all did, just as we trusted newspaper photographs. Now that era must come to a firm end, and I believe it's a tragedy.