Do you mean that "Before [economic] growth became a thing, [life] was a zero sum game?". I'm genuinely unsure what you mean by that. By any measure, the history of life on earth has seen many ups and downs in biodiversity. So the flourishing of one species often coincided with the flourishing of many other related species. A well-known example would be various pollinating insects and birds and the flowers they pollinated in the early cretaceous.
If you mean "eat or get eaten", then there's a few early red flags that the pursuit of growth and decarbonisation concurrently may well lead us back to that idea. There's a strong correlation in politics worldwide of extreme xenophobia with climate change denial, and growth-focus with "others pollute more than us".
If you think "carbon budget" then it's compelling to grow yours at the expense of others.
Problem is, locally, a zero-sum game can look quite non-zero-sum (as opposed to globally). And perhaps vice versa too (in time scales, eg universally)
I'm all in on renewables+albedo driven globally pos-sum games :)
(Until heat death of solar system)