Anything past the paycheck is a gamble.
In other words, they couldn’t afford them but the payments were promised anyway. The people making the decisions and benefiting from the pensions didn’t care because they’d be retired by the time it mattered.
This has been a real problem for some cities where dealing with pension related payments and debt has become a huge burden that crushes their budgets and takes away from services that non-retired people need. There are crazy examples like Oregon where the system was so broken that pension payments were actually higher than the person’s salary before they retired, so retiring made their pay go up during the craziest window.
The reason so many people got “screwed” out of those pensions is because they were sold something that couldn’t have worked. The reason those don’t exist any more is because you can’t pull that trick again and the places that had these pensions are already paying too much to old retirees to even think about adding new ones to that crushing expense bucket.
If you start making a reasonable pension program that can last, it’s not as amazing and people aren’t drawn to it.