More like 25 years ago, at least in France. The 2001 Renault Clio 2 I'm driving has throttle-by-wire, the newest car I personally know of with a mechanical throttle is a 1998 Peugeot 205, the last model year of a car that debuted in 1982. I doubt any European car manufactured after 2001 has a mechanical throttle, if only because of European emission standards.
> The only thing that would cause a petrol engine to really go out of control would be if it was fly by wire throttle and that throttle position sensor was broken in the particular way that it’s reading as full throttle. Idk if manufacturers do this but it wouldn’t be hard to design a fly by wire throttle that when it fails the ecu will see it as closed not open.
On the Clio 2 car, there are two redundant linear potentiometer tracks. If the dual measurements don't match or if either sensor is disconnected, the ECU will default back to a slightly higher than idle throttle.