You may have found a forth that didn't have much compiled code, which is not impractical since Forth generally compiles very quickly compared to other languages. But I was disagreeing with this statement, "Traditional Forths didn't have a compiled form". I think if you look around at Forths from any period you will find very few that are not compiled with only the user code loaded at run time.
Funny how small aspects of something stand out and are remembered. Forth was invented by Charles Moore who was developing code to control telescopes. Since then it has done many, many other things. It has two main attributes in my opinion. One is the interactivity when controlling hardware which is actually useful for many, many non-control apps as it facilitates testing. The other is the flexibility as the language is easily extensible and allows the developer to create a "custom" language to suit the application.