Allegedly, similar logic was applied to development of weapons- the designed lifetime of some was deliberately capped at a few hundred rounds because "soldiers won't last longer".
Soviet doctrine solved the problem of maintaining fast advance with fragile men and equipment by subjecting individual units to intense, but very short, engagements. Specifically, a field army would have "echelons", where divisions of the first echelon would fight an extremely intense battle to achieve a breakthrough. Once that breakthrough was achieved (or failed), entire divisions would be rotated out, allowing fresh second-echelon divisions to take up the battle.
This meant that if your tank could only do a combat-week's worth of driving before needing to go back to a depot for refit, that was fine; your armored division would send its tanks to the maintenance depot all at once while the troops were recovering from their week in hell.
For more on how this would work in practice, see this NATO write-up of Soviet doctrine (specifically starting at around page 2-5 in their weird page-numbering scheme): https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm100-2-1.pdf
Quality and reliability weren't controlled for in USSR. Only sheer numbers.
That's a very strong statement. Could you elaborate on that a bit more please?
No incentives for quality.
Is that so? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_quality_mark_of_the_USSR: "Obtaining the sign allowed the enterprises to increase the state controlled price for the goods by ten percent." Arguably this was abused, as explained later, but the original statement that quality control was absent in USSR is not entirely correct. There were penalties for "doing things deliberately wrong" and quite severe from what I recall. Then again I might have warped perception as I grew up in a city with several "black box factories".
Edit: typo
Everything made in USSR was shit, unless manufactured on recently imported equipment.