Early in my career I had to deal with similar issues, but with cellular networking equipment. I do think it's one of those things where if you have a way to detect the bit flips it happens way more than you think... but most people can't detect them and mostly get lucky enough that they never see an impact when it does happen.

But because we had some equipment that would checksum itself we were able to see the bit flips happen, probably every 1-3 weeks or so I'd find a bit flip.