Can you "optimise" for crash tests? Like, say, software is optimised against specific benchmark to give good scores.
As for what constitutes "modern" in this context, the first FEM simulations for iterating car crumple zone designs have been run in the 1980ies.
NHTSA testing has been developed over a long time, and in conjunction with studying both real-world and laboratory crashes, so I imagine they are quite realistic and representative. The one way that they equivocate the tests that I am aware of is to divide vehicles into weight classes, but this would be difficult to take advantage of.
The fractal nature of software is the way that the abstract specification - concrete implementation dialog appears at all levels of detail.