“We can’t make those UX improvements to our core open-source product because then we’s have to introduce untested code. The current code is tested because users have used it and reported the bugs and we’ve fixed them.” Is a real thing a project lead said to me at a previous employer.

"Or customers are better at finding the bugs than we are so just give it a quick look over and ship it" - genuine quote from CEO at a company I soon left

Honestly, I'm surprised more companies don't formalize this. There are places that offer customers discounts or feature-request priority in return for being beta testers, which seems like a major improvement in both integrity and efficient feedback.

I suppose it's both slower and more expensive than "just ship bad code at full price and wait", but I'd still expect more companies to choose it as the intermediate option between that and comprehensive in-house testing.