Contrast this with a car accident where massive blunt trauma forces have crushed and wounded lungs, livers, bones, etc. There's no one "hole" to fix, just blood oozing from thousands and thousands of micro tears. Surgery won't fix these people.
Make sense?
I'm sure that where a well-designed hollowpoint tore open organs irreparably, there'd be no reason to use this technique.
Through-and-throughs and knife wounds are still reasonably common, to my understanding...
Military rifles, firing FMJ ammunition, do have a huge temporary/cavitation trauma vs. direct trauma (unless they hit bone).
Although I have a personal theory about why FMJ battle rifle (e.g. 7.62 NATO/.308) torso wounds tend to be fatal, at least in the field: there larger temporary trauma diameter stands a good chance of shocking the spine and disabling long enough for person to bleed out unless someone else quickly comes to their aid.
If you follow the Fackler school of "terminal ballistics" as I do, even for rifle velocity wounds this is "at best a secondary mechanism, if not irrelevant." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Fackler). It's the "permanent wound cavity" or ""permanent crush cavity" that does the real damage, soft tissue appears to be awfully good at getting pushed to the side and springing back.