It may be #2 perpetually in many cases because the boss will not listen when you insist it's important. For many it then starts slipping down the list, as what is best for the company is often not best for the employee: For many it becomes a reasonable (for them personally) risk to take to bet that they'll do better from keeping the boss satisfied now rather than spend time on backups to avoid a major disaster after they've left. And yes, that means gambling that the major disaster won't hit while you're still there.
I'm not saying this is how it should be, but it is how it often becomes if the sysadmin or whomever taking on those responsibilities don't report to someone who also see the data integrity as priority #1 for the sysadmin.
I've worked in places where the CEO's e-mail client configuration is the #1 priority for the guy that should have been focusing on server backups, for example, and where prioritising the backups would be a bad career move for the person in question.
(Yes, that is a huge warning sign that it's best to find a different job)
But by the time you're hiring full time for the position, outside of a few edge cases where maybe you're SnapChat and you are growing 20% a week, it's probably time to settle down a bit and be sensible. At which point, if testing your backups to completion to avoid catastrophic data loss isn't #1 on the todo list, it's #2.