I would say another child of the 90's is management / users being too trusting of technology which IMO is the real reason for this mess. These days, everyone knows that software can make mistakes and one shouldn't rely on a single system / data point when it comes to critical decisions (ie. sending someone to jail).

I don't think that was so much the case in the 90's, attitudes seemed to have been that these sorts of systems don't make mistakes, and therefore can always be trusted. I look at this as the 90's version of "The Titanic is an unsinkable ship"

EDIT: I would add that you can rely on systems / single data points for some decisions. How I see it is trust in a single point of data goes down as the criticality of the decision goes up. If someone sends you a message to meet them for lunch downstairs, that decision has low criticality and therefor you can rely on a single data point / application to make the decision. However for more critical decisions (ie. should we send this person to jail for stealing money), trust in any system should be low by default and a consensus from multiple data sources is required.