I've seen it happen so many times in my career - corporations cut back on everything and anything possible to place profit over all else.

Never is this more so than in IT.

What's one of the first things they tend to cut to reduce 'costs'?

Software Testing -

The mechanical problems of the Max 8 were even more severe. The most well known of these is the now infamous auto-piloting system called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). The software was installed to compensate for the plane’s inherent tendency to stall, a byproduct of attaching a newer, larger engine onto the half-century-old Boeing 737 chassis.

This was done to avoid having to design a new model, thereby sharply lowering the cost and duration of the process of design, production, training and certification. As internal documents that have since come out reveal, Boeing’s fatal rush to market a new medium-range commercial jet, intended to serve as the company’s workhorse aircraft, was, like all subsequent decisions, driven by considerations of profit, market share and stock price, with safety at best a secondary consideration.

MCAS was designed and installed as a relatively inexpensive fix to the stalling problem. The existence of this system was not even mentioned in the pilot training manuals. Pilots were not told that the plane’s computers were given the ability to override pilot controls if the system deemed it necessary. Boeing ultimately gave MCAS 10 times the control over the pitch of the plane than it told test pilots, meaning it could crash the plane given faulty inputs.

This is exactly what happened in both crashes. Each plane’s angle of attack sensor wrongly indicated a stall, and because only a single sensor was tied to MCAS, rather than the industry redundancy standard of two or three sensors for critical functions, the software forced both flights into an unrecoverable dive. Black box recordings of the pilots bear this out. They plunged to their deaths, along with hundreds of others, desperately trying to manually override MCAS.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/30/boei-d30.html

The problem is, software testing is primarily about thinking first, then doing. Someone has to think up what to test and how and then discover what actually happens. In many ways software testing isn't about what a product or service is supposed to do, but rather discover what the software is actually doing.

And the idea that 'automation' (really just software) can just run all the tests is also pie in the sky. Software doesn't think; humans do. It takes a human to think of an idea and turn that into a test. Companies don't want to pay for that.

Unfortunately, people who flew on those two 737 Max 8 flights —Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018 in Indonesia and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019— were mostly not white or American. They were expendable.

Think that's hyperbola? Show me how many Boeing executives, board members, or stockholders have ever been held accountable for these people being killed.