I'd submit the answer is actually a firm "no"... it just moved into dimensions you can no longer see. Open up a modern car. See that square latch of stuck-on foil with some padding under it that looks pointless? It kills a sound that you never noticed, because the engineers already killed it for you. Noticed how the modern car runs more smoothly down the road? A lot of that comes from endless days of supercomputer simulation that told them where to place the engine mounts. Those engine mounts look displeasingly asymmetric, you say? Turns out that's a feature, not a bug! Symmetry introduces noise modes.
Yes, there are absolutely ways that modern cars shave pennies in the design... my Dad (recently retired test engineer) and I often converse about how to spend $100 more at the factory to get a much nicer car, but in ways that don't or can't affect sales, so they don't happen. But at the same time, they are marvels of engineering that simply blow away what we had 50 years ago on almost every meaningful metric. (Maybe price... for better and for worse, the legally-mandated minimal safe car is pretty expensive nowadays... they'd love to offer you something cheaper but it can't pass safety tests.)