Source for "states began issuing them to people who were not eligible under federal law"? Because I am pretty sure that didn't happen.

The REAL ID thing came out of the federal government and states not having minimum standard for identification right after 9/11 where they felt they needed to protect against fake ID that like most post 9/11 rules had nothing to do with 9/11. Then they forced the states to take on the actual work that really should have been a federal job for their standards. It was a knee jerk reaction to an event when they started looking at all kind of things they decided needed to be better regulated, but in the case of IDs there was not the problem you cites but instead simple a lot of different state IDs with a lot of different things on them that were designed to be used to allow people to drive cars, not as a federal ID.