Plenty have found to be bad dumps or hacked versions, or not the exact versions they claimed to be in that time and replaced, you're just oblivious to it.
Also there's a big difference between a cartridge and an entire game PCB in that a single near automated method can be developed for one, while the other is a unique challenge of parts often not previously encountered before each time. It's rare for a cartridge to have an obscure, undumpable at the time, part for protection. It's common for an arcade PCB.
Even those recent Nintendo leaks highlighted that a decent number of the GameBoy ROMs that have been out there for 20+ years were actually incorrect (either hacked by the dumper, or with bad/corrupt data that nobody caught, or if they did catch it, where that knowledge had subsequently been lost to time, because of exactly what you talk about, people just using the bad old ROMS from Nesticle days and resisting / ignoring change)
The latest version of MAME always requiring the best known ROMs is one of the best things about the project, it prevents so many problems.
The traditional console scene allows you to live in ignorance, that's the main difference.
I've said this before, but I have a friend who has a favourite PS1 game. They waited 10+ years , downloading each new update of emulators, wondering when it would be fixed in the emulators. Even through multiple reinstalls and fresh downloads of the game, the game breaking bug they encountered persisted? Why? because they were using a bad CD image, the same bad CD image that had been spread on many sites, and was continuing to be spread, even if it had been redumped since then. The emulators never informed him that there was a problem, the sites were all hosting the old 'popular' image (and further spreading it because it was the most popular one) while the new, correct image was much more difficult to find. 10 years he waited to play his favourite game again after his original media failed when he could have been playing it that whole time if the emulator had spat out the image he had and told him the image he had sourced was bad / outdated and refused to run it.
Emulation, as a whole, is always moving forward. It always helps to stay up to date in terms of both the emulators and the ROMs, even outside of MAME. Some parts of the scene do allow you to turn a blind eye to that, and while it might make things seem easier to you, it isn't a positive in the long run and causes many more problems.
I'll admit for some of the Console stuff documented in the Software Lists, MAME could be doing better for popular systems, I've tried to encourage community involvement a bit more to keep things synced up there, but this is an area I hope can be improved in the future. It is just as important that MAME properly represents current knowledge there too, especially as for a lot of the more obscure systems MAME is becoming the primary documentation for the systems and what is dumped, so the lists as a whole are becoming more authoritative in terms of saying what's right and what's wrong.