They got away with not doing everything right because they successfully corrupted the FDA. Other equivalent bodies assumed the FDA wasn’t corrupt and accepted their qualification of the aircraft.

I know you meant the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration but it's hilarious to imagine it was all down to a corruption of the onboard food service that caused these 737 MAX crashes, since the food preparation and storage would be regulated by the Food & Drug Administration

FDA

I don't think the Food and Drug Administration has much influence over commercial aviation.

Intended or not, software bugs are unavoidable. So are mechanical errors, human errors, administrative errors, and regulatory errors. That is why there should always be a human at the end of this stack of Swiss cheese to notice and plug the holes. Aviation didn't become the safest-by-numbers method of transportation because it was made to be perfect -- accidents happened, and the engineers learned from them to make the next iteration safer. Hopefully Boeing's current bollocking is another such event.

Before the 737 MAX was grounded, there was at least one incident where the MCAS caused the airplane to trim nose-down, and it was a pilot who noticed that the trim wheel was spinning and physically intervened. I've consumed most of the Mayday series and several podcasts on the topic -- there were many incidents where loss of life was averted by true human ingenuity. That's why I always want a human operator, even if only to supervise the machine.