My instinct is that you're probably correct, and most planes are probably riddled with similar problems and would look bad if they came under the same scrutiny as the 737 Max is currently under. For example, I remember after the 787 was launched there was a few stories in the press about the batteries catching fire mid-flight, but it turned out the designers and engineers had accounted for that possibility and it wasn't really a big deal. They've improved the batteries, but it didn't actually hurt anybody.

However, the problem with the max seems to be that instead of designing for failure - assuming that critical systems might fail and the plane should recover gracefully from the failure of most internal systems - they seem to have designed for success, and made the assumption that no part of the plane will ever fail. And that's obviously not realistic, and we're seeing the consequences of it here.