I don't know of any server type and ops team in which they'd allow machines to spend over a year without a restart. While not all, there's a few patching cycles that force you to restart machines and if you're not patching kernel and not restarting them, then you're doing OPs wrong IMO.
Even for critical infrastructure, you plan for such scenarios.
This being said, I don't know 100% of the industry and there may be cases where they do have a valid use case for a machine to be always on from the moment it's put in service, but I just don't know of any or even could rationalize that being the case.
Anyway, the bug sounds funny and easily avoidable.
Regards.