> I would say that regexes that matter in practice, e.g. when digging through logs, have clear boundaries that curb the pathological backtracking behavior

I agree with you in the sense that most practical regexes do not expose this quadratic blowup (from all matches) but i do not think the same about backtracking. The effect of backtracking is immediately clear when you're searching inside text without a clear anchor like \A or ^ or a very rare string prefix. It is much more visible with either larger patterns or larger character classes like unicode