Some of the sound drivers would be paired with a machine code monitor, and therefore you could interactively develop by modifying hex bytes, which when you think about it, is basically the prototype for a tracker workflow.
There was definitely a tendency to do "compose on the piano, then arrange" with a lot of the early chiptune workflows though. With Galway's stuff there is more reliance on proceduralism to get those long evolving sequences, something which is actually easier to access when it's built from source files and you can define rhythms, chords, dynamics, modulation as forms of indirection.
Sound trackers actually originated on the C64! Chris Huelsbeck's Soundmonitor is generally regarded as the first tracker. There were plenty of others, such as Electrosound, Future Composer, Ubik's Music, and the Ariston Music Editor. It's not that nobody used software for this kind of thing, but it was pretty common to just use your own sound routine and toggle stuff in.
There was definitely a tendency to do "compose on the piano, then arrange" with a lot of the early chiptune workflows though. With Galway's stuff there is more reliance on proceduralism to get those long evolving sequences, something which is actually easier to access when it's built from source files and you can define rhythms, chords, dynamics, modulation as forms of indirection.