It's pretty well known that back in the 8-bit days, most console QA done was pretty much just caring whether the game will boot up and play more than whether the writing was properly localized. This is why we got so much engrish back then.
As to why it still happens now? Well, I'd blame cultural xenophobia and a prideful sense of themselves, like they just don't *expletive* care what anyone outside of Nippon thinks.
Then we have companies like LJN back then who just didn't even care about quality or disregarded QA entirely, and were simply focused on pushing out as many titles per year as they could in the hopes that at least one of them could actually be successful; hindsight is 20/20, but considering it was an age before the internet, timely reviews from anyone who wasn't just renting a copy were hard to come by, so marketing tended to con a great many into thinking it was better than it really was. Annoyingly, that kind of crap still happens.
As to why it still happens now? Well, I'd blame cultural xenophobia and a prideful sense of themselves, like they just don't *expletive* care what anyone outside of Nippon thinks.
Then we have companies like LJN back then who just didn't even care about quality or disregarded QA entirely, and were simply focused on pushing out as many titles per year as they could in the hopes that at least one of them could actually be successful; hindsight is 20/20, but considering it was an age before the internet, timely reviews from anyone who wasn't just renting a copy were hard to come by, so marketing tended to con a great many into thinking it was better than it really was. Annoyingly, that kind of crap still happens.