The MCAS system was built to work on a very buggy angle of attack sensor. They are notoriously unreliable. The max kept one on each side of the plane (the airbus equivalent has 3 on each side). Further compounded by the fact that the (this was true at the time and theyve joined systems now) pilots computer only used the left side of the plane instruments and the copilots computer only used the right side.
So no. Boeing fucked up in the first place by trying to stealth fix a hardware problem (stalling at a new lower angle of attack in the "same model airplane") with software. And then lying through their teeth about the impact of this.
The equivalent military 737max with MCAS simply allowed the pilot to more forcefully adjust the flight control stick to turn it off. So they knew better.
Companies attempting to skirt legislation in the face of better profits is always going to cause issues here.
The entire max disaster was an attempt by management at Boeing to get pilots to be able to fly all 737s with basically no retraining.