A clog doesn't quality as something going terribly wrong. Empirically, my plumbing costs are $300 over 10 years. By comparison, rats are actually a big problem in the deep wooded suburbs. We spend a lot more on exterminators, rat traps, poison, and mesh covers to keep them out of the house. Rats smell bad, scare the girls, attack the chickens, spread garbage around the pickup area, spread fleas to the dogs, and are a nontrivial vector for serious human diseases.
So given that rats are a bigger problem than clogs under my current policy of scraping plates down the disposer, I should probably do it even more.
So what are they for? If you scrape your plates so there are only tiny bits of soft food going down the drain you don't need a garbage disposal anyway. I don't have one and I've never had a blockage.
Someone selling a convenience product does not necessarily mean it is not flawed.
The company that sells you a garbage disposal doesn’t really care if there’s plumbing issues ten years down the line, or if the waste treatment plant can’t handle it, they already got paid.
Another example of this in the plumbing world is flushable wipes. They cause tons of issues in plumbing systems.
It could be that it never happens, but most food waste should go in the trash or ideally compost.