I think modern testing culture and source repositories can help avoid this kind of negligence in software projects today. I'm hardly Panglossian enough to sugge

I think modern testing culture and source repositories can help avoid this kind of negligence in software projects today. I'm hardly Panglossian enough to suggest that it's common, but if you have an engineering culture where specifications and especially regressions are encoded in tests, it starts becoming clear when your software project is or is not satisfying the requirements. Decisions like removing a test because it fails intermittently are documented by source control, and can be reviewed by peers and management.