Things like this are common in software of the era, but few look for such things.

That doesn't answer the question at all. They said specifically that they expected this in tetris before it happened for some reason.

The entire nature of the kill screen in NES Tetris is that the game crashes because the game has written over its stack.

It might help if you told us what you think makes Tetris unique in that an ACE would be assumed to be implausible rather than simply not yet found

...that does answer question tho?

tetris = old game

old game = expectation of ACE bugs

thus, tetris = expectation of ACE bugs

That is what I meant, thank you.

Not many people actively look for bugs like this. It usually takes a chance discovery to be made widely know before someone else realizes that they have everything needed to do something like this.

If people actively looked, like they scrutinize modern software, these things would be fully understood, or at least fully documented, in no time. But, as I said, almost no one looks.