Yes and no. "Worse is Better" also implies you allow someone outside your problem domain to define abstractions you use to decompose the problem domain (and construct the solution domain.) So... I mean... that's probably not TOO bad if they're well-understood and well-supported. Until it isn't and you have to waste a lot of time emulating a system that allows you to model abstractions you want/need to use.

But at the end of the day everyone knows never to assume STD I/O will write an entire buffer to disk and YOU need to check for EINTR and C++ allows you to wrap arbitrary code in try...catch blocks so if you're using a poorly designed 3rd party library you can limit the blast radius. And it's common now to disclaim responsibility for damages from using a particular piece of software so there's no reason to spend extra time trying to get the design right (just ship it and when it kills someone you'll know it's time to revisit the bug list. (Looking at YOU, Boeing.))

I do sort of wonder what happens when someone successfully makes the argument that C++ Exceptions are a solution often mis-applied to the problem at hand and someone convinces a judge that Erlang-like supervisory trees constitute the "right" way to do things and using legacy language features is considered "negligence" by the courts. We're a long way off from that and the punch line here is a decent lawyer can nail you on gross negligence even if you convinced your customer to sign a liability waiver (at least in most (all?) of the US.)

Which is to say... I've always thought there is an interplay between the "worse is better" concept and the evolution of tech law in the US. Tort is the water in which we swim; it defines the context for the code we write.