Even though you are being sarcastic, certainly you realize things like defensive programming were much more heavily used in such environments.

So yeah, it was entirely possible they didn't introduce more bugs.

Now people just expect to crash often and make it up in volume.

They can of course, which is precisely the problem the original author has: in a ton of contexts, fast and able to hack up things is more sellable than understanding problems.

(and FWIW, i actually haven't thought hard enough about it to have an opinion whether the current status is better or worse, i'm just explaining why it's not necessarily about cost to develop).

Successful SaaS software have the property to accumulate more cash for every minute they're online & working, they can do pure and chaste AND profitable. That's where the difference between software and the snow white stops :p