Proper way of restoring base backups
Usually a basebackup with no further description would mean the thing taken by pg_basebackup.  But that didn't exist back in 8.2., so it isn't clear what &quot;a basebackup&quot; means here.  Not that it is very clear anyway, as pg_basebackup has many options.
The article you linked to is for point-in-time recovery.  Obviously a base backup cannot include changes that had not yet happened at the time the backup was taken.  The WAL archive is needed to roll the database forward from the ending time of the backup, to the desired point in time.  If you don't actually want to do a PITR but just restore to the ending time of the basebackup, then you won't need the recovery.conf, and you also need to not do the rm -rf /var/lib/postgresql/10/main/pg_wal/*.  (Although if you did run that command, it wouldn't do any harm anyway as the directory in question was not called 'pg_wal' back then.)  You just start up the database.