That sounds like an excuse which I don't accept. I have a formal engineering background and whilst you're fundamentally right, engineering is based upon cumulative experience gained. We have a hell of a lot of experience as a society of writing software that works and is of merchantable quality.

What the general state of affairs shows is the following traits:

1) There is no thought and research going into the design of a piece of software. Ergo, we do not learn from past mistakes.

2) There are isolated individuals writing vast swathes of software which are trusted unconditionally. Ergo, we do not learn the benefit of multiple eyes on a problem, review and discussion.

3) We assume that software is correct from one person's viewpoint and opinion. Ergo, we do not test software properly nor cover those tests with objectives.

4) We work to deadlines, not quality objectives. Ergo, we trade quality for tolerance from others.

In this case someone came along and didn't think about the problem, didn't work with others, assumed they were unconditionally correct and chose tolerance over quality.

To use your analogy, they're now selling stainless steel lightning rods (poor conductivity), are the only vendor of them, are a vocal marketing front and houses are catching fire everywhere.

Or more specifically, in one example, the entire process was above and from the author to the distributor, no one even noticed that loginctl doesn't work properly.