Sweeping generalisation there on people in "real companies" not being able to use Bootstrap's default theme.
That's precisely what we do at my place. We don't do it for customer facing things, but for back office tools why would we spend time customising Bootstrap? There are better things we could be doing with our time.
Properly theming (at least in 3.x) took a lot of effort. Just try to make a theme whereby at first glance, you can't tell that Bootstrap was used. It's not that it's not possible to do, it just took a lot of time and effort to nitpick over every detail.
In professional environments (ie: real flesh and blood companies), developers cannot say "we're using Bootstrap's default theme". The business has designers, the designers come up with a design, and unless the developer can customize Bootstrap to accommodate the requirements, in a reasonable amount of time to meet deadlines, Bootstrap is simply not an option outside of using the grid system.