I always wonder, why not write these games on top of a virtual machine like Carmack started doing in Quake, a usage he then later extended to quake 2 and 3 [1].

I'm ignorant about game development, virtual machines and system programming but from the little I understand it seems a sensible choice to make.

While there is an initial price to pay modeling 99% of the game to be implemented on a user-implemented stack seems a sensible approach to me.

[1] https://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/qvm.php

The article mentions using breakpoints, so they did use a debugger.

This is a game; I don't think a debug configuration (with checks for things like this enabled) would run fast enough to be playable on contemporary hardware.

Tools like valgrind/asan/msan would have flagged this instantly too. Just a unit test of that vehicle loader would have seen it.

Really this is more a story about poor development practice than it is an interesting bug.