I’m pretty sure it’s implied that said Fallout 2 kid was talking out of their ass if you had a high enough Intelligence to press them.
There’s an unbelievable amount of plot holes in fallout that are a lot easier to explain if you consider some folks in the post-post-apocalypse might be full of shit.
Unreliable narrators. TES has them too.
Hi ‘how could jet have been found in vault 95 during the events of fallout 4 in 2287 after being placed there by vault-tec before the war when jet wasn’t even made until 2242 during the events of fallout 2 by a kid in new reno the drug couldn’t have been put in a pre-war vault if it was made 165 years after the great war’
I’m Dad.
My head cannon was always that someone figured a way to trade with the surface at some point, then covered their tracks.
Someone dropped something down an air vent to hide it, maintenance go to figure out why fan 56 is on the Fritz again and find something.
Over 100s of years there’s ways to explain and then have people forget how things ended up how they are.
How some of the skeletons stay undisturbed is a mystery though.
