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Basic fuzzers can surprisingly go a long way. Barton Miller (the professor who first coined the term fuzzing), actually wrote a paper last year [0] where he just ran a very basic fuzzer against a bunch of common UNIX tools. Even after all these years of testing/usage, they still managed to find a ton of issues.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.06537.pdf

Isn't that the 1995 paper? The original study was 1990.

He was my teacher, and he taught this in class :)

I'm pretty sure his fuzzer was "for each file in system send as input to program X" That was the original tool, revisited was repeating the original test (might have tested against more programs which had become common since then)

Argh, this is the paper I meant to link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.06537.pdf

(Updated the above comment as well)

Did they expect to release in a non working state?

Most companies, for better or worse, value time to market over fixing every last bug.

Sounds like it didn't work very well for the task of finding significant bugs?