The mesorah of the litvaks is a true mesorah, not something that was invented just a couple hundred years ago.
What a joke! Today’s Litvish persona is a creation of the Yeshivah world of the 1800’s. Those yeshivas were, themselves, a synthetic creation that has never recovered from its origins. In their day, they functioned as a clearing house, creating a unified faceless group, dismissing all the ‘outdated’ local customs and identities, and creating in their stead a neutral, bland and synthetic academia that could not, and did not relate to the everyday world.
The single positive result that has emerged from the yeshivas happened when they came into contact with Hasidic Orthodoxy after the War, which introduced their students to Shulchan Oruch, and strict adherence to Halachah. In this respect, the chasm between the average pre-War yeshiva student and his namesake since the 1970s cannot be overstated. It represents a monumental shift of perspective. Modern Orthodoxy did not of course partake of this shift, as its entire raison d’etre is diametrically opposite to just that perspective.