Especially in Rails it is. Since there have been so many iterations on how to sanitize input strings and typically you have explicitly choose not to sanitize it

Especially in Rails it is. Since there have been so many iterations on how to sanitize input strings and typically you have explicitly choose not to sanitize it to allow for this to happen. Which is exactly what the author of that code did. So yes, I'm in general against mocking coding mistakes, but in this case I'd say its warranted given that the person at fault actively tried to cheat his way out of using the framework provided primitives.