Just wanted to reply to myself that I just learned from evanelias' comment a "strict mode" flag is indeed an option. I suppose it's time to audit all my mysqls to see which ones have this enabled, and what other mysql-isms this flag might break.

I know it's definitely not enabled on one updated and maintained BSD - this could be because they didn't want to break existing systems during upgrade.

I suspect this problem is still extremely common. But good to know there's some form of defense.