>In the old days people didn’t check them and they’d run around on underinflated tires on the highway until they had a front end blowout and took out a family minivan in the neighboring lane.

This is revisionist history through the lens of screeching people on Reddit.

Back in the old days you didn't need to "check your tires" because it's flagrantly obvious visually and in terms of handling when a tire with a 65 or 75 aspect ratio is low.

The reason we have a bunch more requirements on tires is because of all the finger pointing that ensued as a result of the Firestone Explorer debacle suddenly made formerly irrelevant few-psi differences in pressure very important. TPMS is there because you can't get a good visual read on lower profile tires until they're quit low. If you're not oblivious it won't matter you'll feel the vehicle handling funny long before they actually get low enough to cause problems though.

What "solved" blowouts was changes in construction. They started putting a couple extra belts into passenger car tires in the mid 00s. It mostly has to do with cap improvements that help prevent the sidewall from opening up at the shoulder.

Back in "the day" (so like 80s on down) everyone ran their tires to failure (usually bald, but often blowout as well) as a matter of normal practice, bought used tires left and right and blowouts were pretty common, even more common back in the really old days of tubes. It didn't reliably cause an accident unless you behaved hysterically in response, hence why everyone felt fine doing it. But that was so long ago ago, nobody much remembers it, nobody wrote about it on the internet and therefore it doesn't exist for the purposes of online discussion.

My VW Golf has ABS based tire pressure monitoring and for the most part it works. The disadvantage is that it can only tell you if one tire is flat. If they all get slowly flat over time there won't be a significant discrepancy between tires and they will not trigger any warning.

I consider that a worthy tradeoff though, I can just check the pressure once in a while and I get to save money on my winter wheel set.

Did it have something to do with the Ford Explorer?

But anecdotally, we were driving through Chicago in the family Subaru Forester, and got a huge gash in one tire. The Soob has so much automation in its drivetrain, that it still handled OK enough and we didn't notice there was a problem until the TPMS light came on. We had to cross a couple lanes of very heavy, fast traffic, to get off the road.