But in practice, "best practices" are always set by some sort of stagnant bureaucracy, often some sort of quasi-union organization that demands fees and spends

But in practice, "best practices" are always set by some sort of stagnant bureaucracy, often some sort of quasi-union organization that demands fees and spends all its time trying to keep newcomers out of the profession in order to protect the salaries of those already inside it. Worse still, it can lead to dysfunctional behavior industry-wide that has no competitive path to fixing it. Look at what's happened to medicine. Huge numbers of people have had their confidence in doctors seriously damaged over the past 2 years because they keep saying things that are patently nonsense, like "oh your period vanished for 5 months immediately after taking a vaccine, it must be a coincidence" (this happened to a friend of ours). Why do they say these things, well, because if they go against the party line on vaccine injuries they can lose their license: https://trialsitenews.com/doctors-sanctioned-for-speaking-out-against-official-covid-policies/ https://trialsitenews.com/doctors-sanctioned-for-speaking-ou... That sort of action has nothing to do with best practices and everything to do with power structures. The software equivalent would be something like, "if you imply Java is not the best language to build enterprise software in, you could lose your license" or "if you write forum software that doesn't run every post through this officially approved AI for misinformation, you can lose your license". It doesn't look like bugs magically disappearing. I'd expect the rate of bugs to go up, actually, as standards ossified and became irrelevant (see: FIPS).