Given that no aircraft have fallen out of the sky due to this poor maintenance it must mean that for 2 decades the rest of us have been over maintaining and wasting our money.
Not really, we just spent the frequent money on continuous maintenance and the once without proper maintenance now may get one 20 years bill ... There have not been many incidents caused by poor maintenance, but from the SIDs I saw I would say, not yet. One example: there are birds out there where the gear U-bolts have no time restriction and I have seen two now, where it would have been only a matter of little time until doing the gras bite on landing.