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The geodetic reference frame is a company decision
Treating the choice of a coordinate system as a technical parameter lets a structural decision be made by default, project by project.
In most organisations I have seen, the geodetic reference frame was never actually decided. It was inherited, then carried over, then contradicted by a project with good local reasons to do otherwise.
Why the error stays invisible for so long
A frame mismatch raises no error. Data displays, computations complete, maps are legible. The problem surfaces only when two datasets from different sources have to line up, often years later, and often under time pressure.
By then, fixing it is no longer a matter of reprojecting: you have to find which transformation was applied, by whom, and with which parameters. That information is rarely written down.
What this means in practice
The frame should be chosen once, documented, and imposed on contractors through the technical specification. The cost of that discipline is low. The cost of its absence is measured in data rework and in decisions taken on wrong positions.