Like people who explicitly bought or mined bitcoin with literally zero KYC back in the day when it was easy to do that. And are now moving the markets buying and selling. Is that still a thing or not?
This is still a thing, although not as big as it used to be.
Or have pretty much all of the ancient whales touched an exchange or cashed out?
No one way to know that. Most of the bitcoin addresses that you see that doesn't have its contents moved for a long time can easily be assumed as an 'early adopter' wallet, although there are also a good number of those untouched addresses that may no longer be accessible. You can always get a good guesstimate, but unless one such whale confirms that he/she is still active and still is a whale at this point, you will never know who are the ones that are still around.