I'm not guessing. I'm just answering you by ignoring/disregarding your personal experience, and instead treating you as a random variable sampling the population of people who use all possible software, and then talking about what that random variable would look like.

Why? Because we don't need anecdotes to know this particular thing — we have the data. We know what the random variable actually looks like. (How? Because people have downloaded "all of Github" or "the entire Debian package archive", and run Valgrind over it, and uploaded the resulting dataset to BigQuery!) By the Law of Large Numbers, we can actually do stats about, effectively, what "all software" looks like.

By volume, the majority of POSIX software that calls malloc(2), is incompetently-written, with no checks on the return result of malloc(2). This is an objective, verifiable fact.

By volume, the majority of POSIX software that has a call to malloc(2) that does check the return value, exists as the result of a managed-language compiler emitting a language-runtime-level check into the compiled binary, rather than as an explicit source-level check. Another objective, verifiable fact.

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It so happens that the software making up the "backbone" of an OS / average LAMP server is more competently-written, because it's had a lot more attention and engineering time put into it.

But the same "power law of features" from e.g. Microsoft Office applies here — there's a core set of stuff everyone uses, but every user also has some weird stuff they are in the small minority of users for. And that stuff is what breaks.

As it happens, that lesser-used stuff is also usually mission-critical to the operation of a business; otherwise people wouldn't be driven to use such not-a-lot-of-engineering-effort-put-in software in the first place. People are using this stuff "in anger", if they're using it at all.

Which means that, sadly — insofar as most developers creating business-process IPC pipelines, don't already have the hard-won experience to build in fault-tolerance for individual processes within that pipeline — we see production systems where these malloc(2) failures are Single Points of Failure for the entire system. The flakiness of these long-tail programs, drags down the reliability of most systems-as-a-whole.